Data collection for IT metrics: is the industry ready?

Industry stakeholders recognize that to truly understand IT infrastructure efficiency, data center operators need to report a facility work per unit of energy metric. Most operators are, however, unprepared to calculate this metric.

KEY POINTS

• Good practice (and possibly future regulation) requires operators to understand the relationship between IT work and power consumed and how the total capacity is being used. Operators should work with all stakeholders to prepare for this.
• Most IT operators have poor inventory data, with 20% unable to produce a count of installed IT equipment and only 30% able to track component data. Inventories need to be improved to include CPU SKU numbers and work capacity, and memory, storage and network capacity.
• Generating a work per unit of energy metric will require data center managers to move beyond just tracking instantaneous utilization and power demand. They need to expand their data collection processes, capturing and aggregating utilization and power demand data, standardizing data formats and maintaining the data in an enterprise-level database.
• IT managers need to work with their equipment suppliers and industry organizations to standardize work capacity values for server, storage and network equipment.