The Costs of EUCOC

I'm often asked about the costs of participating in the EUCOC, so I decided to get things down on paper (well in this blog anyway).

With the  EUCOC, it costs nothing to submit an application to the EC JRC team to get your Data Centre listed as a participant to the code, however the application form can be a tad tricky if you've never seen one before and if you don't have the required information to hand, this adds time mostly internal.
From my estimates it will take an internal resource about a week (not cumulative) to gather together all the info required to submit the form, it can take up to 6 weeks to ask questions of the facilities guys, the IT guys and the IT director.
Filling out the form once you've gathered all the info will probably take about a day.
So, using a conservative £250 per day of internal resource cost, you looking at least £1500 (6 x £250) just to gather and submit the information and that is an absolute minimum.

So, how to minimise the costs of making a EUCOC application and ensure that it will not get rejected due to a lack of information (one the biggest rejection points is people telling the EC JRC that certain elements of the best practice have been implemented but not actually telling us how)?

Well, the obvious best way is to get somebody within your organisation trained up specifically in energy efficiency skills from various Data Centre training outfits, such as DCD and C-Net, this will cost approximately another £1000 on top of the internal resource costs.

But, here at Carbon3IT Ltd we think that a better way to help would be to run a workshop that looks at the specific things you'll need to complete an application, and to provide application assistance through a follow up visit on site (if taken) so we've partnered with Concurrent Thinking Ltd to develop a EUCOC workshop which will be held in London on the 28th March and 11th April and in Manchester on the 4th April.
The costs of the workshop is £495+ VAT and we'll be releasing the booking form (via eventbrite) shortly
We're restricted these events to 10 delegates and there is special pricing available for the early birds (20% off), if you'd like the discount code and for further information please contact us on info@carbon3it.com.

The workshop will take you through each element of the EUCOC Application form, and you'll be safe in the knowledge that your form will totally compliant to the requirements of the EUCOC and you'll hear tips and tricks to minimise energy consumption in your data centre, whats not to like?

The course is aimed at anyone who has a data centre and wants to reduce energy consumption, it will also be suitable for any organisation that is intending to provide services to G-Cloud or services to the public sector, this is due to HMG endorsing the EUCOC (See separate Blog Post), this means that Govt will be seeking participation for all data centres that will be providing new services from April 2014.

As LOCOG put it in the summer before the London 2012 Olympics, get ahead of the game(s), get your data centre(s) approved as EUCOC participants before you need to.