Saturday 11 January 2014

An early January Update

This week has been very busy indeed, first of all we had a few catch ups with one of our partners over a huge project they are involved in, cant say too much as its still in the tender stage but it is data centre related and could yield a lot of work for us in 2014 (we'll keep you informed)

Gary Thornton of the BCS DCSG instigated a thread on the linked in website regarding the CCA and we've made a few comments about this.
We may have some news on this soon as we understand that some behind the scenes work is being conducted by various Government departments to progress the implementation of the CCA moving forward.

We've been finalising some CEEDA assessments (3) and all of them have been delivered to the delivery partner for publishing to the clients.

One piece of very exciting news is that John is the prospective chair of the Data Centre Alliance's energy efficiency committee, this of course, builds on our work to be the first point of call for all things related to data centre energy efficiency.
More information on the work of the DCA can be found here.
We will find out on the 20th Jan if John has been selected as chair.

We'd also like to draw our readers attention to the EU's Eco Design directive for servers here, this is an very important piece of prospective legislation that we, in the data centre industry need to be aware of as it will impact on the design and operation of energy efficient data centres in the coming years (we understand that its about 4-5 years off!) 
There have been many industry comments regarding the 1 side of the PUE calculation, that is of course the IT side of  things, where M&E engineers have been bemoaning that whilst they have done all they can to reduce the cooling side of the equation, IT does not seem to have made any great progress, this really is a fallacy though, as IT has improved its energy efficiency by the use of virtualisation and the inherent Moores law of a doubling of compute power every 18 months (meaning more compute per watt).
It is perhaps in the software side of things, i.e. actually code that uses processing power more efficiently and minimising idle and standby energy that is the real key here.
However, the eco design directive is a very good start as it will ban the import of servers that do not meet a required energy efficiency standard.
As I said above this will not happen overnight so you will not see your favourite brands suddenly disappearing from sale, but you may see a slimming down of server ranges and perhaps (and we are seeing this more and more) tech companies moving into the Cloud in a big way and only offering their systems in a cloud format on a leasing basis.
This is obviously going to have a big impact on the way uses IT, perhaps it may be time for pure techies used to working on in house it systems to retrain in other fields as the days of the IT department in today's sense may be disappearing for good.

Enough doom mongering for now and lets think about sunnier climes and a more relaxed way of life and move onto to Mauritius, well we're probably going back out in April/May to lead some Green IT and EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres training courses and to attend the IST in Africa event, where we hope to present a paper (this weekends task) and maybe to establish our permanent presence on the island.

We're also planning to hold our first TIF event in Coventry soon and details on this can be found on the events tab of our website here

Have a great weekend and we'll see you again soon, until next time....

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