Over the years, data centers have grown from a handful of servers in a basement to hundreds, thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of servers in one location. Such configurations can have a major impact on the electricity grid and its users in a given region. Over the years, data center workloads across the industry have increased eightfold. Remarkably, the total energy consumption has remained virtually the same. But still: data centers consume a very significant amount of electricity.
Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, compares the total amount of energy actually used by computing equipment in data centers with energy required for secondary processes such as cooling or security. The lower the PUE, the greater the share of energy used for the primary process.
