Data Centre Specialist Group

The DCSG committee and members have discussed opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of data centres and the equipment within them at several meetings. This is currently seen as the most important issue we have to deal with. We have also discussed making representation or recommendation to the UK Environment Agency on regulation of our industry. It is well recognised that government regulation, whilst well intentioned is frequently subverted or bypassed relatively quickly and simply skews a market rather than generating the beneficial change intended. To this end the DCSG wishes to assist the UK regulators in creating effective regulation for equipment vendors and data centre operators that can provide material improvement in environmental impact without unecessary business and commercial impacts.  

With this in mind the efforts of the US EPA are significant in that they will influence our market, vendors and UK / EU regulators.

A summary of the key findings and recommendations of the draft report will be presented at the next DCSG members meeting, see the events calendar for details. 

The EPA Study 

You can find the EPA Study Page here; to summarise, the US Environmental Protection Agency is "conducting a study to assess opportunities for energy efficiency improvements to computer servers and data centres in the United States." "EPA is looking to stakeholders to help populate this report based on industry expertise"

This draft report makes for interesting reading as any regulation on data centre or equipment energy efficiency standards or targets is likely to influence the global market, the EU and the UK Environment Agency.

There is significant work on the projected growth in power requirements for data centres weighted against the availability and uptake of new energy efficient device and data centre technologies. Significant attention is paid to the options of local power generation and CHP including using waste CHP heat to chill the data centre. Section 5 of the report looks at reliability and exposes the myth certain vendors are propogating that an energy efficient data centre cannot be a reliable data centre.

The report is, for the most part remarkably independent and well balanced considering that much of the input has been from the sponsors including APC, Hewlett Packard, Intel and VMWare. These sponsors are all vendors to our industry and there is the risk that their business models lean toward regulation that drives the purchase of new equipment without requiring significant investment on their part in fundamental change to the technologies and products they produce.

In order to drive significant and beneficial change in the energy efficiency of Information Systems we will need to question all aspects of how services are designed and delivered. Many of the current trends and practices in our industry are focused too heavily on the delivery cost and time of a business service and do not pay sufficient attention to the lifecycle operation and maintenance costs or the environmental cost of the solution. As carbon taxes or other measures come in to place we will have to add the environmental cost of a service to the development, capital and operational costs to deliver effectively to the businesses we support. For us to continue delivering business benefit and competetive advantage a more realistic, holistic approach to lifecycle cost is required, one that includes the environmental impact.