The fallout over The New York Times article, which was highly critical of the energy attributes of data centers, continues. The Times asked McKinsey & Company to analyze the energy utilization rates of data centers, finding that on average a data centers used just 6 to 12 percent of the power it draws from the grid. It’s true and been my experience that utilization rates are extremely low, mainly because data center operators are always planning for the next big spike, like when Michael Jackson died and Twitter and Yahoo came under stress. But the McKinsey analysis checked in with data centers from “drug companies, military contractors, banks, media companies and government agencies.” And if there was one thing unfair about the article, it was the fact that companies like Facebook and Google are doing an enormous amount to lower cooling costs, increase server efficiency and bring power usage effectiveness (PUE) rates close to 1, the point at which all power coming into a data center is used for computing and not cooling/infrastructure.

The value, however, of the article was in pointing out the issues related to idling servers. You can have a PUE of 1 and still be wasting power to keep servers idling, not running compute tasks. And if there’s one positive outcome from the article, I think it’s going to be a boon for the data center infrastructure market (DCIM), which includes companies like Viridity and Power Assure. These companies specialize in data center analytics and dashboards to help maximize utilization and turn down servers, which have poor utilization rates.

I’ll be off Wednesday but looking forward to being back Thursday with more analysis on the redesigned GigaOM Pro Site!