One of my clients made an interesting comment this week about a new way they are thinking of measuring their data centers.  Anyone dealing with virtualization knows that measuring a data center on square feet or number of physical servers alone is rather meaningless.  We mostly talk about ratios:  VMs per Socket (CPU) or VMs per Core.  But as green initiatives push on I had one client mention the new metric of VMs per Kilowatt hour.

This is interesting because it not only takes into consideration the efficiency of your virtualization solution, but also the power efficiency of your servers, storage, and network.  What is the efficiency at which one can run a data center?  When you get into a cloud computing environment where users pay for what they use, don’t the providers also want to only be paying for what is required?  If companies are now placing notes in their annual reports on their corporate carbon foot print, shouldn’t they also be thinking about defining, measuring and tracking their data center carbon foot print?

This takes one down an interesting thought process that I think I’ve only scratched the surface of.

(Thanks goes out ot Mike P. for pointing me to the above Dilbert strip!)