In the end, the central "clients" of any datacenter are the CPUs, Memory, & Disk Drives. James Hamilton of Amazon has written extensively on the topic - if we can narrow ourselves down to these central components, we will be getting somewhere. That is not to say that the efficiencies of infrastructure components isn't applicable (it most certainly is), but the true goal is to deliver as little energy as possible to the computing components and, in parallel, ensure the optimal environment for them to do their work (you'll see some metrics out there talking about useful work, etc)...the cooling, heat extraction, etc.
Cutting to the chase, the ultimate (IMO) shall reflect both the power source (carbon impacts), power delivered (transmission) to computing components (and all losses) and the power used to provide/maintain proper environment (this includes server fans ala JH's writings) - then we will truly understand how/where we can further optimize our Information Plants...
Richard Donaldson
CEO - Core4 Systems / 6connect
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