Data Centre Players Join EU Green IT Project

A consortium of data centre technology suppliers, design engineers and scientific researchers has formed in support of the European Commission CoolEmAll project, which is producing tools to make data centres more sustainable.

Data centres are growing rapidly with the move to the cloud, but they face criticism from environmental groups such as Greenpeace, for wasting power, and relying on dirty sources of energy. While Apple aims to use 100 percent renewable energy, Facebook has kicked off the Open Compute project which is looking for savings in data centre hardware. CoolEmall involves universities and industry players, and aims to produce computational tools to make data centres more efficient, which can be fed into the industry.

Birth of the cool

“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.

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