How successful has been the use of benchmarks and baseline numbers for improving energy efficiency in datacenters?
Most organisations do not use any control on this – datacenters are seen as too critical and a relatively small contributor to total energy requirements, most attempts to manage energy efficiency focus on the percieved major areas (which often actually means the most visible areas) – mostly office area consumption for non-industrial organisations. The only times I have seen energy consumption of datacenters seriously considered is when these have operational concerns outside of the straightforward drive for energy efficiency – such as a limited energy supply to the building/data center, or data center cooling not being sufficient and reducing consumption (which generally reduces heat generation) as an alternative to expensive new cooling installation.
