The next generation green Data Center a modified Power Usage Effectiveness metric proposal for a CCHP Natural gas or Biogas fuelled architecture

Abstract

Nowadays the use of data centers is largely growing for internet activities or network-based works. Frequently, the data center main use is to handle data and operations that are judged to be classified or essential, such as safety related applications or company/government databases. The IT services, with the advent of cloud computing, become a progressively critical part of everyday business activities, and then the power consumption of today's data centers rise steeply due to the rapid growth of their scales and the required high reliability levels. These aspects aggravate, significantly, the operational cost of data centers. In the last decades many organizations (i.e. the Uptime Institute, Data Center Dynamics) have debated approaches to enhance and standardize the datacenter designs also for energy concerns. A lot of metrics have been presented to improve a comparison and an understanding of efficiency and energy use in data centers. The most prevalent metric used in rating and ranking discussions is the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness). The energy impact is expressed by the PUE value and it's used by the facility infrastructure to distributing the power to the IT equipment, deliver necessary cooling to the IT equipment, and maintain stability and redundancy in power delivery to the IT equipment. The biogas fuelled CCHP systems offer the possibility of high levels of reliability and they could be arranged with a local storage of gases. The potential of the CCHP is to decrease the air pollution and carbon emission and to rise, significantly, the source energy efficiency. Actually, there are not too much tools to be used by the data center designers to bring the cost, the sustainability, and dependability assessment of such data center infrastructures. In this context, starting from a data center benchmark, the aim of this paper is to propose a modified PUE metric for a CCHP Natural gas or Biogas fuelled architecture .