Fixed to Variable Energy Ratio (FVER)...FVER lets you do to software and IT what you did to data center infrastructure with PUE, target and drive out the inefficiency Target the wasted

Fixed to Variable Energy Ratio (FVER)

Gary Thornton and Adrian Jones

Data Centre Specialist Group

Agenda

• Metric Philosophy

• Evolution of Metrics

• The FVER Metric

• Applying FVER

Metric Philosophy

The ideal metric is:

• Useful to the target audience

– How does it help me understand and improve my data center?

– Does an improvement in the metric value translate to improved

business value $/€/£?

• Easy to measure (often traded with accuracy)

• Accurate (often traded with ease of measurement)

• Reversible

– Reporting (Internal / External)

– Analysis (Decision making)

Data Centre Metrics 4

What Do We Want from Metrics?

Ideally we’d like a metric to be:

Measure and report something the audience

wants to know

Be applicable to the situation

Be able to measure in the same way for multiple

users

Compare between two (or more) users

Compare for one user over time


Metrics Are a Trade Off

Simple vs. Useful

• Successful metrics are simple

• Useful metrics are complex

• Why does this need to be a trade off?

Evolution of Metrics

PU

E

DP

PE

IT W

ork

DC

EP

Pro

du

cti

vit

y P

rox

ies

Using Energy as a Proxy for Productivity

Some proposals suggest using the energy

draw of the IT equipment as a proxy for

measuring “IT Work”

– Reduces the measurement complexity and

cost

– Inherently over-reports utilization / IT work

– Rewards poor utilization

– Rewards disabling power management

– It is not reasonable to expect that a server

which draws 100W at 100% load will ever

draw 1W at 1% load

THE FVER METRIC

FVER Metric

FVER lets you do to software and IT what you did to data center

infrastructure with PUE, target and drive out the inefficiency

Target the wasted energy not doing “useful work”

FVER Metric

FVER measures the ratio of fixed to

variable energy

The ideal FVER is 1, just like an ideal PUE

FVER = Fixed Energy (kWh)

Variable Energy (kWh) 1+

Target the Wasted Energy

The problem

– If your car used the same amount of gas parked as when driving on the

motorway you would consider this to be a fault

PDU A1, B1 Rollup with Trendline

123

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128

9:00

AM

12:0

0 PM

3:00

PM

6:00

PM

9:00

PM

12:0

0 AM

3:00

AM

6:00

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9:00

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kW

Target the Wasted Energy

FVER and Productivity

Productivity measure

– Accept that “productivity” is subjective, user specific and not comparable

between operators

– Allow each operator to select or construct a relevant, appropriate and useful

productivity metric which relates to delivered business value

Useful Work

In FVER the user defines their useful work metric, they may use a

productivity proxy or perhaps a more business specific metric such as:

• Webpages served per hour – for a news website

• Transactions per second – for someone like paypal or ebay

• Bits output per hour – for someone like YouTube

• MIPS – for a super compute facility

• Bytes written to disk

• Etc.

Simple Example

• Select a useful work metric

• Recorded work output and power consumption every hour for a week

• Choose the best and worst hour

– Best hour was 3pm-4pm on Thursday, energy consumed was 1.2MWh

– Worst hour was 3am-4am on Sunday, energy consumed was 1.0MWh

FVER = 1000 kWh

200 kWh 1+ = 6

Simple Example – Enable Power Management

• Make a change - Enable power management

• Recorded work output and power consumption every hour for a week

• Choose the best and worst hour

– Best hour was 3pm-4pm on Thursday, energy consumed was 1.2MWh

– Worst hour was 3am-4am on Sunday, energy consumed was 0.7MWh

FVER = 700 kWh

500 kWh 1+ = 2.4

Applying FVER

Tracking and measuring FVER

– Changes behavior by

identifying the opportunity

– Allows comparison of data

centers by providing a

normalized score

– Score may be reported

between 1 and 10

FVER Metric

FVER measures the ratio of fixed to

variable energy

The ideal FVER is 1, just like an ideal PUE

FVER = Fixed Energy (kWh)

Variable Energy (kWh) 1+

Download the White Paper

FVER white paper available for download:

http://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/DC FVER Metric v1.0.pdf

FVER calculation sheet available for download:

https://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/Example FVER calculation sheet.xlsx

http://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/DC FVER Metric v1.0.pdfhttp://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/DC FVER Metric v1.0.pdfhttp://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/DC FVER Metric v1.0.pdfhttp://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/DC FVER Metric v1.0.pdfhttp://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/DC FVER Metric v1.0.pdfhttp://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/DC FVER Metric v1.0.pdfhttp://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/DC FVER Metric v1.0.pdfhttp://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/DC FVER Metric v1.0.pdfhttp://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/DC FVER Metric v1.0.pdfhttp://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/DC FVER Metric v1.0.pdfhttps://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/Example FVER calculation sheet.xlsxhttps://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/Example FVER calculation sheet.xlsxhttps://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/Example FVER calculation sheet.xlsxhttps://dcsg.bcs.org/sites/default/files/protected/Example FVER calculation sheet.xlsx


Summary

Gary Thornton

[email protected]
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]

Documents

Fixed to Variable Energy Ratio (FVER)...FVER lets you do to software and IT what you did to data center infrastructure with PUE, target and drive out the inefficiency Target the wasted