Microsoft plans to reduce the average power usage effectiveness (PUE) in all its datacentres speard across the world from 2 to 1.25 within two years.
Microsoft senior director of datacentre evangelism Rick Bakken told about the plan to a CIO forum in Munich.
PUE shows how efficiently a data center uses its power; specifically, how much of the power is actually used by the computing equipment and how much is consumed by other facilities such as cooling.
PUE is calculated by finding the ratio of total amount of power used by a data center facility to the power delivered to computing equipment. An ideal PUE is 1.0.
Microsoft has about 100 datacentres worldwide and accounts for 3% of all x86 servers sold worldwide each quarter. At present, the company’s PUE is at 2.00, higher than Google’s 1.10 and Facebook’s 1.07.
To achieve the target Microsoft has set, it will have to improve the efficiency of its data centres by 75%.
