That’s put a spring in our step!

The big news this spring is the start of the EURECA project. For those that missed updates on the presentation at Data Centre World 2015, we will explain what this is all about and why this is probably the most important data centre industry project yet. First of all some background, it is the 2nd EU funded project the DCA have participated on, this time it is a Horizon2020 project of 30 months duration and it has a total budget of €1.5M. There are eight project beneficiaries who are University of East London, DCA, Green IT Amsterdam, Cerios Green, Carbon3IT, Maki Consulting, Norland and Telecity GmbH.
The project is our response to the EU Commission’s funding call which laid down specific challenges to stimulate market transformation towards more sustainable energy products, buildings and services within the Public Sector. This included the EU Energy Efficiency Directive which requires that central governments purchase only products, services and buildings with high energy-efficiency performance. The call asked for proposals to overcome the operational barriers related to sustainable energy public spending such as the lack of knowledge, practical training and tailored guidelines, and also the lack of willingness to change procurement habits or perceived legal uncertainties.
So in our world of data centres this is a real challenge, but also a great opportunity to influence a market many would say needs to be opened up. On top of all that consider all that is happing in our sector: data centre KPI’s, best practices and maturity models coming at us from all directions, ISO/IEC, ITU, EU Code of Conduct, CENELEC and ETSI to name some. This is becoming an increasingly complex landscape, even the excellent EU Code of Conduct now comprises of over 150 best practices.
So in very simple terms, the projects goal is to make all of this accessible to the non-expert both in language terms and to signpost the self-improvement roadmap of data centres, server rooms and computer rooms across the European Public Sector. The methodology we proposed is to develop a tool that a public sector procurement officer or representative can use to input information about their data centre. This will range from the very basic such as energy consumption & temperature data and simple best practices such as “group involvement” through to more advanced information such as server utilisation data. The output of the tool will provide maturity level scoring, along with recommended actions, relevant market navigation signposting and business case construction for improving the energy efficiency of their data centre. This could result in the purchase of products and services from all our members be it technology, data centre services or training.
Having presented the project to the industry at DCW15 we officially launch to the Public Sector at the Public Sector Show at London’s EXCEL on June 23rd. We would like all members to help with the project by referring public sector contacts who are both already energy efficiency “champions” to help with knowledge sharing and also those who are looking to improve the energy efficiency of their data centre. Updates and opportunities to comment or contribute to the development of EURECA will also be made freely available at dedicated website to be launched soon and announced over the twitter sphere and airwaves.