May 2017 Update

Its been a busy few months since our last update but exciting and sometimes quite stressful times as well. I did promise an update in April but circumstances and travel conspired to make a lot of demands on my time, anyway heres the May update.

The EURECA project continues at pace, more information can be found on the project website www.dceureca.eu
We've had 3 events since the last update, namely Stockholm, Berlin and Barcelona, all the events were fairly well attended and we've had some impressive speakers from public sector organisations detailing some of their own projects and ones where the EURECA project can help out. We have a meeting scheduled next week with an EU Government developing a full cloud services suite and planning to build their own new data centre, this will be "state of the art" and hopefully will adopt many of the EURECA project standards and specifications, we'll keep you posted on that project.
Due to this project and the fact that it is just at the start up and specification stage, we have applied for and been granted an extension to the project, so wheras the original project was 30 month duration and due to end in September 2017, it has now been extended to February 2018.

As a result of this extension we are still available for work on pilot projects, please let us know if you would like some free consultancy (terms and conditioins apply). On that note, we are still discussing a possible pilot with another EU government but they are currently in purdah (which should provide a clue as to who it is!) Again we'll keep you updated.

Our midlands datacentre standards project has been delayed due to various issues, but we have meetings with the principles next week and hope to be able to start our work before the end of May.
The delay has in fact been fairly productive as we have been given the opportunity to design the second phase of the proposed "National Data Centre Academy" and we've been hard at work talking to various organsiations about what they need for specific training courses and inviting them to view site (if you'd like to visit, please drop us an email on info@nationaldcacademy.com and we'll ping you back some dates)

On NDCA matters, we will be exhibting at edie.live next week (23/24th May 2017) at the NEC in Birmingham with our partners the Data Centre Alliance and IDC Achill Rock (our landlord) we'll be on stand N36 and you can use the following link to get your free tickets edie.live tickets

The NDCA project is essentially a step change in the delivery of data centre training, we'll have the usual classroom environment, but we're adding special rooms to deliver practical skills including something very special, I'm going to keep that under my hat for now as we have our partner coming to see the site and demostrate some kit next week, I can guarantee that this is a world first and potentially another real change to the way that we deliver certain types of training.

I completed 2 CEEDA assessments, one in Stockholm, Sweden and one in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and we have 3 scheduled for June, one in Ireland and 2 in Gibraltar, one of these is a reassessment and one is their new facility. We also have a number in the pipe for later this year, I'll keep you posted.

Our work with the DCA continues and we have been very busy 2 exciting new projects, of which more will be revealed by the DCA themselves, we wouldn't want to steal their thunder.
We'll be at the Datacentre Transformation Conference in Manchester on the 11th July, more information and registration can be found on this link I'll no doubt be speaking at the event and as always the DCA will be holding a mini event the day before in the afternoon, followed by networking drinks in a local hostelry. Once the details for the event are finalised I'll let you all know.

We attended the DCS awards last week, congratulations to all the organisations and people that won awards. Its always good to go to these events to catch up with colleagues in the industry, its a shame that sometimes its the only time you see them but thats life!

So, our main events over the next few months are as follows:

23/24th May edie.live
6-8th June Data Cloud Congress, Monaco
19-23rd June European Sustainable Energy Week, Brussels TBC
10th July DCA Update, UoM, Manchester
11th July Data Centre Transformation Conference, UoM,  Manchester
17th - 21st EURECA Training Week, NDCA Birmingham





Advanced Warning, a date for your diaries, the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres best practices committee has been provisionally scheduled for the 27th September in Ispra [more details once the meeting has been scheduled]

Until next time...