As the first company to provide customers with detailed information about how data center operations are meeting their corporate green IT objectives, Digital Realty Trust says it will also publish benchmarks that will support industry-wide initiatives to make data centers greener and reduce energy costs.

PUE is a relatively new standard promoted by The Green Grid and others in the data center industry to offer a simplified method of measuring the ratio of power delivered to IT equipment to the total amount of power consumed by the data center facility.

The data center energy metric provides reliable information about the energy efficiency of data center facilities by assessing how much power is consumed to driving the actual computing/IT components in comparison to the ancillary support aspects such as cooling and lighting.

"Digital Realty Trust has been a leading voice on this issue since well before it gained the prominence it has today, and has achieved a number of important industry milestones related to green data centers," says Jim Smith, VP of engineering at Digital Realty Trust. "However, I believe that reporting the PUE metric for our data center facilities is the most significant milestone yet because it will provide a model and benchmarks that can be used industry-wide to achieve dramatic increases in energy efficiency and can be used by customers to compare the energy efficiency of different data center facilities."
 
Though energy costs have typically made up for approximately 10 percent of IT budgets, Gartner Research estimates that this percentage could soon increase to more than 50 percent of departmental expenses because of energy cost hikes, rising demand for computing capability and continued implementation of high-density computing strategies.

Data center energy usage, in particular, accounts for a rising percentage of the total energy usage in the United States. The EPA estimates that data center energy usage has already grown to comprise two percent of the US' annual electricity consumption -- a figure that is only expected to grow in the future.
 
The company is reporting PUE data about its two facilities in Santa Clara, California, two facilities in San Francisco, California and a facility in Piscataway, New Jersey, on spec sheets available through its website. The company says it also plans to expand the program to include all of the future facilities it develops worldwide.

Digital Realty recently publisehd the results from a new study it conducted on green data center trends that "show significant changes since 2007."