Data Centre Players And Researchers Unite To Shed “Dirty Man Of IT” Tag
There is a war on carbon dioxode emissions and Britain is on a carbon footing
A consortium of data centre technology suppliers, design engineers and scientific researchers has formed in support of the European Commission CoolEmAll project, which aims to make data centres more sustainable.
Britain’s reputation for pollution once earned it the tag the dirty man of Europe. Now, the reputation of the data centre industry, one of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels and the only sector expanding, is becoming equally tarnished. But the consortium aims to rescue the industry’s reputation.
Dirty man of Europe
Members now include CA Technologies, Future Facilities, Norland Managed Services, Carbon3IT, University of Notre Dame, and University of Leeds.
CoolEmAll aims to increase understanding about the interaction between IT hardware, software (applications and workloads) and power and cooling systems within data centres. The initiative is developing a number of tools, blueprints and other resources to help data centre designers, operators and technology suppliers to build and run more energy efficient facilities and equipment.
“Support for CoolEmAll is enabling research and development that’s impossible for a single vendor or research body to conduct on the scale required. By bringing together all these parties we can achieve our ambitious goals to cut data centre CO2 emissions and costs,” said Andrew Donoghue, a senior analyst at 451 Research and CoolEmAll consortium spokesperson.
The consortium should deliver commercial and scientific viability and push back the frontiers of efficient data centre design and operation, he said. The Advisory Board members bring a range of expertise to the project with CA Technologies, Future Facilities and Racktivity all developing tools for infrastructure management.
Meanwhile, the University of Leeds is investigating the potential of liquid cooling in data centres. Norland Managed Services, Future Tech and Carbon3IT will investigate issues around the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres. The Uptime Institute will provide professional services, education and certifications for the data centre industry. It will also keep and manage a network of data centre operators.