Data Center Issues Heat up in London - By Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Nov 8 2010)

This week is green data center heaven in London. At least if you like conferences and events around the subject.

There’s Green IT Expo, a one day show right opposite the Houses of Parliament, that promises a focus on the public sector, with speeches from Christopher Chant, who is leading the UK government’s move to the cloud, as well as people involved with major government green IT contracts such as the Environment Agency, which recently planted itself in a CapGemini’s Merlin facility - which claims to be the UK’s greenest data center.

This is a broad-spectrum, high-level green show, with sessions on mobile working and sustainable cities.

Across town, DataCenterDynamics, looks like getting more into the nitty-gritty of running racks of servers and keeping them cool. There are sessions on the future harmonisation of green data center metrics, and in-depth discussions of Merlin, as well as the Colt modular data center.

DataCenterDynamics features a presentation from APC entitled “Do New Physical Demands Spell the End For Traditional Raised-Floor Cooling?” That’s a subject which ought to get the data center community’s antenna twitching.

DataCenterDynamics isn’t missing out the political dimension. It’s got a session on how the UK’s CRC which promises to be interesting. As we reported here, a sudden government U-turn last month changed the CRC from a revenue-neutral scheme to a carbon tax.

The change has been incredibly sudden, and some people estimates that it will add ten percent on the cost of energy, by taxing it at roughly £10 to £15 per tonne of CO2 released. DataCenterDynamics will be the first time that subject gets properly aired in public amongst data center people.

Some of DCD’s advance publicity asks the question whether the change in CRC will be good or bad for the data center industry. Perhaps surprisingly, though the measure clearly raises costs, it seems to be an open question.

In DCD’s pre-conference survey of 80 people who run data centers in the UK, only about half said they thought it was “possible “ that the scheme would push investment overseas to more lenient tax regimes. A third said it was “likely” or “very likely”. The only consensus was that more than 80 percent were concerned about the rising costs and the confusion that the change will cause.

Given the facts, it seems people are surprisingly optimistic. Part of the reason for that is that since the CRC is paid by whoever uses the electricity, it’s going to push more of the UK’s business servers into shared data centers. If someone else is powering your server, they pay the carbon tax, not you.

Of course, most readers of this blog don’t care about the CRC - except as a possible precursor of end-user carbon regulations elsewhere. Also not many of you will be in London. You may be interested to know, then, that I’m chairing a webinar at BrightTalk. It’s called “Best Practice: Optimizing Data Center Efficiency and Sustainability”

This event, part of a BrightTalk virtual summit, features, among others, Steve O’Donnell, who writes the Hot Aisle blog and runs data centers in Qatar. Steve claims he can get great PUE even in a hot climate, and we’re going to be discussing just how hot you should be running your servers.

Webinars are more energy efficient than travelling to events, so that’s one plus. It’s on a 1pm UK time, which means it’s not specially convenient for people stateside - but it’s going to be available in recorded form right after we finish.

I hope to meet some of you in the webinar, if not at any of this week’s London events!

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