EU sets Code of Conduct for Greener Datacentres
The European Commission (EU) has requested that data centre owners voluntarily sign a Code of Conduct which encourages a best practice when it comes to energy efficiency, and provide monthly energy reports and an overall annual report to an EU secretariat.
The Code of Conduct states that: “Electricity consumed in data centres, including enterprise servers, ICT equipment, cooling equipment and power equipment, is expected to contribute substantially to the electricity consumed in the European Union (EU) commercial sector in the near future.”
The man behind the plan is Paolo Bertoldi who is part o the EU’s Renewable Energies Unit is taking responsibility to ensure greener datacentres. Bertoldi has been, for the past two years, behind a working group that has had a series of meetings including, European government representatives including DEFRA, and various manufacturers with a business interest including Intel and Sun Microsystems.
Bertoldi has worked hard to encourage the support of multiple public sector bodies across the length and breadth of Europe, by taking on jobs that they can’t do, or don’t want to do, and getting them involved without over-committing them – an impressive feat fro the generally slow to move EU.
The EU press release said that, “Historically, data centres have been designed with large tolerances for operational and capacity changes, including possible future expansion. Many today use design practices that are woefully outdated. These factors lead to power consumption inefficiencies. In most cases only a small fraction of the grid power consumed by the data centre actually gets to the IT systems. Most enterprise data centres today run significant quantities of redundant power and cooling systems typically to provide higher levels of reliability. Additionally IT systems are frequently run at a low average utilization.”
The Code of Conduct has been put on place to reduce European data centre power consumption, and has the support of the British government.
Companies and public sector bodies will sign up to the CoC, agreeing to a set amount of initial energy consumption, monitor it month by month, and try to undertake some best practices, like virtualising servers, using cold-aisle cooling and not mixing hot and cold air in the data centre.
This new initiative is an encouraging step toward a greener Europe, it will be interesting to see how data centres change their current practices to adapt to the new rules over the coming months.
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