Miles Per Gallon for Data Centers

At the heart of VKernel is the notion that you can't manage what you don't measure.

I wrote earlier in the week about Will Forest (McKinsey) who is advocating a CAFE-like standard for Data Centers and the MPG analogy works.

If you are running your VMWare at lower capacity levels - its driving a car with a low MPG, increase the capacity and you increase your MPG.

Forest posits CADE - Corporate Average Data Efficiency or MPG for servers.

Take a look at this graphic for CAFE - Fuel Efficiencies

In Cars (and or light trucks) - its MPG vs. Footprint (Sq. Ft).

As they increase in square footage, their MPG decreases - smaller vehicles would have better fuel economy/efficiency but not be able to transport goods/people - so their ROI might be tricky if they had to haul sheets of plywood.

In Servers (not light trucks) - its Servers vs. Virtual Machine Density.

IT shops running the early versions of server hardware are going to consolidate to increase ROI, groundbreaking virtual machine density numbers.

“It clearly makes more sense to become more efficient than to build another $100 million data center,” said Kenneth Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute.

Be more efficient, drive up capacity, save the planet.