For some time big IT companies that are efficiency focused such as Facebook have reported their power usage effectiveness (PUE) to the public. Facebook actually has a widget reporting live PUE data from its massive Prineville, Oregon data center.

While I’ve expressed my belief that I think we need to move beyond PUE as the major metric of data center power efficiency because it fails to assess the efficiency of the hardware itself, it remains the most visible marker of a data center’s efficiency. And the UK’s Custodian, a company that maintains colocation data centers, is pushing the value of PUE by posting live PUE data for its data centers.

What I wonder is whether we’ll reach a point where it becomes standard for colocation centers to have to publish their PUE ratings as part of basic due diligence when a customer considers locating their hardware in that data center. Sure, power rates are often guaranteed in long term contracts for customers, but said customers may want to know not just that they’re getting a good deal on power but that the facility itself wastes very little extra electricity on cooling and general facilities.

Now to making customers aware of how efficient their actual server hardware is.