Columbus, Ohio (November 18, 2008) — An industry-wide measure of data center efficiency is a critical next step in addressing IT energy consumption, according to a new white paper issued today by Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson (NYSE: EMR) and the global leader in enabling Business-Critical Continuity™.

Today’s white paper, Energy Logic: Calculating and Prioritizing Your Data Center IT Efficiency Actions, takes the next step by using a placeholder metric to highlight the value of measuring data center efficiency in the same way that miles-per-gallon (MPG) provides an easily understood, agreed-upon efficiency measure for cars. Specifically, the new Energy Logic white paper introduces the concept of CUPS, or Compute Units per Second, to demonstrate how a metric can work. CUPS is a relative measure of professional server output, based on average server performance in 2002. Using data from multiple industry sources, Emerson Network Power calculated the change in CUPS between 2002 and 2007, providing a common server performance measure required to calculate efficiency. Data center professionals can experiment with CUPS relative to their own data center in an online data center efficiency professional calculator available at www.efficientdatacenters.com.

To promote industry discussion and debate toward development of an agreed-upon approach, today’s new installment of Energy Logic offers three criteria that an efficiency metric should meet: it should drive the right behavior; be available and published at the IT device level to help buyers make the right choice; and be scalable from the IT device to the data center level.