BREEAM Data Centre Scheme Goes Live

A UK-based body has produced a new scheme which should help businesses build green data centres.

The BREEAM rating scheme for buildings, from the Building Research Establishment (BRE Global) has been extended to cover data centres. The new BREEAM data centre scheme is intended to help organisations assess the environmental  impact of their data centre, and should be a help as pressure increases for zero-carbon buildings.

Building expertise turned towards data

International sustainability certification body, BRE Global has been in charge of the BREEAM (BRE Environmental Assessment Method) family of rating schemesfor some time. BREEAM has already been applied to IT facilities, but BRE Global says there has been considerable demand for a standard specifically for data centres.

BRE estimates that the standard could halve energy use compared to a conventionally designed, built and run data centre.

The scheme has been tested and is now open for organisations wishing to participate – but assessments can only be carried out by licenced BREEAM “Other Buildings” assessors.

The certification body says it will refine the scheme over the first 12 months of its operation, using feedback from actual assessments to inform any changes made.

It will particularly focus on further development around the means of assessing the environmental impacts of data management processes, as well as those of the construction and operation of the data centre buildings themselves.

During the develeopment of the scheme, BRE Global worked with wholesale data centre giant, Digital Realty Trust, which said it has already built the first data centre given the top-tier BREEAM rating of “Excellent”.

Jim Smith, Digital Realty Trust chief technology officer will speak at the scheme’s official launch, which will happen at a BREEAM event at London’s Building Centre on 5 July.

Tony Lock, programme director at IT analyst Freeform Dynamics stressed this new scheme was not a standard, but a means of establishing a baseline to guide strategic improvements. This makes it similar to more technology-based schemes such as the EU Code of Conduct designed to encapsulate best practices in data centres.

It will be interesting to compare BREEAM data centre ratings with those scored by other building types going forward, said Lock:”It gives a new way of looking at data centre best practice on sustainability,” adding that the scheme’s take-up would be largely reliant on those organisations that saw IT as a sufficiently large consumer of energy in their businesses.

Roy Illsley, senior analyst at research company Ovum, said that only some 35 percent of chief information officers even see the electricity bill. But, with the introduction of Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme, he predicted this would change in businesses where IT is a big power consumer in largely office-based environments.

“The industry wants one standard,” Illsley added. “But that’s not likely to happen, especially when data centre providers in particular are very reticent to share best practice and possibly competitive advantage. This [scheme] seems designed to be fairly straightforward and may be useful as a baseline metric with which to rate performance.”