B uilding Sustainability’s own research highlighted a major shortcoming with in-house server room energy management as less than 30% of server rooms are actually monitored and even less are aware of the carbon and cost content of the energy they use.

The Uptime Institute 2013 research reinforces our survey results. They state “Well over half of the respondents report that saving energy is a major priority for their organisations and yet most organisations do not have financial incentives optimised to affect real change”.

For example, on average, only 20% of organizations’ IT Departments pay the data center power bill. They also state “Of the small deployment consisting of 500 servers or less nearly 50% are not measuring measuring Power Utilisation Effectiveness (PUE) at all. And only 18% are measuring PUE at the advanced categories. The average global, self-reported PUE from this survey was between 1.8 and 1.89.

Best practice is to operate with a PUE of under 1.3.

Free cooling systems and careful management of air-flow and temperature pay large dividends.

This is a call-to-action to target these facilities in the Workplace by introducing energy management with a focus project to reduce demand.