Christian Belady has a post on the Inflection Point for Efficiency in the data center which provides an early history of PUE as a data center metric.
In my opinion, it wasn’t until 2006 that the industry really did go through a paradigm shift. While there were a few of us who had been pushing efficient computing approaches for over a decade), we had limited success in moving the industry until 2006. What happened in 2006? I think the notion of establishing an industry efficiency metric and data center metrics were born. I thought it would be interesting to recap those milestones based on my perspective:
Christian provides three milestones you can read in his post. Here is the third milestone.
April 23-26, 2006: High-Density Computing: Trends, Challenges, Benefits, Costs, and Solutions
This symposium was the Uptime Institute’s first and it focused on Density trends. However, it was this conference where I first presented an Efficiency Metric called PUE which seemed to capture the attention of many of the attendees. As a result, I published a paper on PUE with my good friend Chris Malone later in the year at the Digital Power Forum. At this same conference, AMD’s Larry Vertal and Bruce Shaw sat down with Paul Perez (my former VP) and I to discuss the idea of starting a consortium called the Green Grid. Ten months later the Green Grid was officially announced with one of its first whitepapers evangelizing metrics and in particular PUE.
and Christian, takes times to reflect.
So our industry woke up in 2006 and while the Gartner graph does show we have work ahead of us, I do think we can say that in less than four years the industry has made great strides (and perhaps I shouldn’t complain so much!).
What we need from Christian is Part 3 on what his prediction of the future is as he is already proven to make history.
He did do this in 1998 and ten years later. /2008/03/christian-belad.html
Mar 27, 2008
Christian Belady's Bottom Line Opinion 10 years ago, We Need A Better System
Microsoft's Christian Belady was going through his old presentations and found a public presentation on The Big Picture, A Philosophical Discussion to Make US Think. Download Cbelady.pdf The presentation is an accumulation of predictions he was making in the late '90s as part of making a case for more efficient computing while at HP.
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Summary
Power is not just a….
•component problem
•System problem
•Data center problem
•Utility Infrastructure problem
We have a huge opportunity to solve these problems as one system and optimize the solution.
WE NEED A BETTER SYSTEM!Big Picture
Bottom Line
We need to cooperate to solve these problems on a much larger scale.
Develop consortiums to address these global issues and influence the industry, government and culture proactively.
We need to ensure that we have a better world.