What does PUE mean?

PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness.

This is a measure of data centre efficiency, expressed as a ratio of power utilised directly by client systems against power used to operate the facility.

A fairly common PUE score for standard data centres is around 1.6 - this means that for every 1kW of energy used by client systems, an additional 0.6kW of energy is used by the site to operate.

A score of 1.2 or below is considered extremely good.

PUE at Netwise

Netwise London East (NLE) has a capacity design PUE of 1.05 - this is considered exceptional, and would place in the very top few percent of operators globally.

The official annual figures will be published for NLE soon.

Our legacy site Netwise London Central (NLC), which is now closed, had a capacity design PUE of 1.12. This site achieved real-world annual PUE figures of between 1.09 and 1.11 while in operation, which also positioned the site as a world-leader, despite being onlined back in 2015.

A score of 1.0 would mean perfect efficiency, with no additional energy used to support client loads. This isn’t presently possible in the real-world, so a score as close to 1.0 is desired.

Most of the facility-side usage is expended on cooling, which is why modern facilities make use of ultra-efficient cooling technologies. We use innovative evaporative cooling technologies at Netwise.

For sites that utilise evaporative / adiabatic cooling systems, PUE is now coupled with Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) for a complete picture of the efficiency and environmental impact of a data centre.