What happens to all that power? 100% of the electricity consumed by IT hardware is converted into heat. But servers don’t like heat. So, you need powerful (but efficient) data center cooling. Cooling by conventional methods requires power though, too. So much power, in fact, that cooling can represent over 50% of the total power requirement of a data center.That basically makes our data centers enormous electric heaters. And we keep building more of them. It’s a trend that threatens to make sustainability more difficult for businesses and even countries. Luckily, there are more efficient alternatives to conventional data center cooling methods. The measuring stick used to determine how efficient a data center’s cooling system operates is known as Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE. The lower your PUE, the better. It’s the ratio of the total power used by a data center to the energy delivered to the IT hardware. A rating of 2.0 is considered standard, 1.4 is good, and 1.0 is the best PUE rating you can achieve.