CADE Metric - Corporate Average Datacenter Efficiency
Continued high levels of CapEx and OpEx data center spending will result in material decreases in corporate profitability or a forced reduction in new application development. Corporate Average Datacenter Efficiency (CADE) is a set of four metrics which together rate the business performance of a single data center or the weighted average performance of a group of data centers.

Executives can use CADE to isolate and quantify how much of their data center's CapEx and OpEx is devoted to value-added information processing by separating energy efficiency from capital asset utilization and IT from Facilities.

"Provisional" CADE data center assessments for internal use can be quickly and easily made using data already available and informed estimates of any missing data. Great accuracy is generally not required to determine major areas of improvement. A "Benchmarkable" CADE diagnostic requires significantly greater rigor in data collection. Benchmarkable CADE scores are necessary when comparing one data center to another, and they are most applicable to enterprises with similar business missions and service level agreements.

CADE concepts are being jointly developed by the Uptime Institute and McKinsey & Company.

CADE separately identifies the IT and facility efficiency of a data center, examining both energy efficiency and capital utilization. The four components of CADE are:
  • Facility Asset Utilization - How much of a facility's power and cooling capacity is being used?
    • Basic measurement concept: [Current IT load] / [Maximum IT load capacity]
  • Facility Energy Efficiency - How much of a facility's total incoming energy ends up being consumed by IT equipment?
    • Basic measurement concept: [Current IT load] / [Current total facility energy], equivalent to the Green Grid's DCiE or 1/PUE under certain conditions
  • IT Asset Utilization - How much IT compute asset capacity is being utilized?
    • Basic measurement concept: [Average volume server CPU utilization]
  • IT Energy Efficiency - How effectively does the data center's IT equipment transform energy into "useful IT work?"
    • Basic measurement concept: [useful IT work] / [IT watts]. Since industry-wide definitions of useful IT work are still under development, CADE uses an arbitrary baseline value of 5% for IT Energy Efficiency
Contact Information:
John Stanley
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