EDSA announces a PUE/DCIE monitoring tool.

EDSA Introduces PUE-DCiE Advisor
for Increasing Data Center Energy Efficiency

EDSA’s Paladin® Live™ is one of thefirst power analytics software program to automatically calculate and present power efficiency ratings, using standards published by The Green Grid

SAN DIEGO, Calif. – August 21, 2008 – EDSA Corp., developers of the Paladin® platform of power analytics™ software, today announced the release of its Paladin® Live PUE-DCiE Advisor™ in support of the new electrical power efficiency standards developed by the global IT association, The Green Grid. The Green Grid is a collaborative organization of approximately 200 leading technology organizations, led by such firms as AT&T, Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and others for which whom mission-critical computing and environmental responsibility are driving corporate priorities.

To embrace the organization’s standards, EDSA’s Paladin Live power systems diagnostics platform has been enhanced to automatically present users with The Green Grid’s Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE) ratings in real-time. Used in conjunction with Paladin Live’s new Paladin® BlackBoard™ option, users gain the valuable ability to take a baseline model of their operations, and – in real time – allow them to make changes or propose “what if” scenarios, allowing them to project the future impact of those changes on the calculation of PUE or DCiE.

This looks nice on the surface.  i would be more interested in a diagram that shows all their monitoring points that support their PUE/DCiE calculations.

The Paladin Live PUE-DCiE Advisor feature attacks the problem of energy inefficiency in two ways: first, the Company’s Paladin® DesignBase™ computer-aided design (CAD) modeler allows power systems engineers to design, simulate, and analyze the power systems model to optimize energy usage prior to construction. Once the facility is operational, EDSA’s Paladin® Live™ platform continually diagnoses the facility’s performance by benchmarking it back against the design model. This continual comparison of design specifications with actual operating parameters helps to ensure that anomalies are quickly identified, isolated, and resolved.

By presenting its findings in PUE and DCiE format, Paladin Live helps data center operators, for the first time, to make informed, real-time decisions about the energy efficiency of their facilities, and develop actionable strategies for ensuring that their operations are as failsafe and energy efficient as possible.

As most of you know how you collect the numbers is critical to getting a good PUE calculation.

Digging a little further I found their Power DesignBase product on this page. Here is feature matrix of their different versions.

A great book to read to think about Green Data Center principles is The Living Company. It has 5 stars from 21 customer reviews on amazon.com

Here is an excerpt from a BusinessWeek post.

After all of our detective work, we found four key factors in common:

1. Long-lived companies were sensitive to their environment. Whether they had built their fortunes on knowledge (such as DuPont's technological innovations) or on natural resources (such as the Hudson Bay Company's access to the furs of Canadian forests), they remained in harmony with the world around them. As wars, depressions, technologies, and political changes surged and ebbed around them, they always seemed to excel at keeping their feelers out, tuned to what-ever was going on around them. They did this, it seemed, de-spite the fact that in the past there were little data available, let alone the communications facilities to give them a global view of the business environment. They sometimes had to rely for information on packets carried over vast distances by portage and ship. Moreover, societal considerations were rarely given prominence in the deliberations of company boards. Yet they managed to react in timely fashion to the conditions of society around them.

2. Long-lived companies were cohesive, with a strong sense of identity. No matter how widely diversified they were, their employees (and even their suppliers, at times) felt they were all part of one entity. One company, Unilever, saw itself as a fleet of ships, each ship independent, yet the whole fleet stronger than the sum of its parts. This sense of belonging to an organization and being able to identify with its achievements can easily be dismissed as a "soft" or abstract feature of change. But case histories repeatedly showed that strong employee links were essential for survival amid change. This cohesion around the idea of "community" meant that managers were typically chosen for advancement from within; they succeeded through the generational flow of members and considered themselves stewards of the longstanding enterprise. Each management generation was only a link in a long chain. Except during conditions of crisis, the management's top priority and concern was the health of the institution as a whole.

3. Long-lived companies were tolerant. At first, when we wrote our Shell report, we called this point "decentralization." Long-lived companies, as we pointed out, generally avoided exercising any centralized control over attempts to diversify the company. Later, when I considered our research again, I realized that seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century managers would never have used the word decentralized; it was a twentieth-century invention. In what terms, then, would they have thought about their own company policies? As I studied the histories, I kept returning to the idea of "tolerance." These companies were particularly tolerant of activities on the margin: outliers, experiments, and eccentricities within the boundaries of the cohesive firm, which kept stretching their understanding of possibilities.

4. Long-lived companies were conservative in financing. They were frugal and did not risk their capital gratuitously. They understood the meaning of money in an old-fashioned way; they knew the usefulness of having spare cash in the kitty. Having money in hand gave them flexibility and independence of action. They could pursue options that their competitors could not. They could grasp opportunities without first having to convince third-party financiers of their attractiveness.

I've been meaning to write about some of these ideas and yesterday at Data Center Dynamics Seattle, I met Jakob Carnemark from Skanska who embraces these ideas with tools they are developing for the Green Data Center by enabling the Living Data Center in the same principles used in "The Living Company".

Skanska's approach of continuous process improvement fits what I have written in the past on being Green is not a binary decision, but a commitment.

I am going to follow up with Jakob to get more details on how they create metrics, monitoring and modeling. His 3M's vs my M3 (monitoring, metering, managing).