2019 EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres prizes awarded

Yesterday evening, the University of Strasbourg, coolDC and Datacenter.com received the 2019 EU Code of Conduct Award for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres during the Datacloud Congress in Monte Carlo, one of the largest conferences dedicated to data centres in Europe.

The Code of Conduct is an independent scheme in the EU to certify that a data centre has adopted energy efficiency best practices.

Data centres measure their energy efficiency in Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). The ideal value is 1 PUE, but the average PUE value is around 2.0.

The winning data centres have been selected out of 21 data centres which applied for the Code of Conduct programme in the past year, based on significant reduction of their energy consumption through the adoption of best practices.

The companies used a combination of the following energy saving technologies to increase their power usage effectiveness: hot aisle contained airflow solutions, “in-row” heat exchangers, adiabatic cooling, UPS technology, low energy usage equipment, free-chilling, liquid cooling and heat recovery and reuse.

Energy efficiency targets are complemented by general commitments to monitor power and energy consumption, adopt management practices, switching off components not needed, and reducing energy consumption where possible.

And the winners are...

• Datacenter.com – for their data centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, designed with the latest UPS technology, for high density (up to 20kW per rack), designed and operates with a single corridor up to half a megawatt (using the scale, lowering overhead and losses). Thanks to the use of adiabatic cooling, it reaches a PUE of 1.04.
• University of Strasbourg – for two data centres, DC361 (HPC Datacenter) with a measured PUE of 1.16 and DC373 (Main University Datacenter) with a target PUE of 1.25. They use both hot aisle contained airflow solution and heat-exchangers “in-row”.
• coolDC – for their data centre in Lincoln, United Kingdom, with a target PUE of 1.1. This scalable, modular, edge data centre has a reduced physical footprint. The flexible power footprint as cooling environment is matched to IT infrastructure, and thus ensuring maximum energy efficiency. It also demonstrates heat recovery and reuse.

Background

The Code of Conduct for Data Centres was created in response to the increasing energy consumption in the commercial sector.

It is a voluntary initiative managed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, with the aim to reduce energy consumption through ambitious energy efficiency measures.

The aim is to inform and stimulate data centre operators and owners to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner by improving the understanding of energy demand within the data centre, raising awareness, and recommending energy efficient best practices and targets.

380 data centres have requested to join the EU Code of Conduct since the start of the programme in 2008 and 350 have been approved as Participants. In addition there are 255 endorsers in the programme, who are vendors, consultants or industry associations.

All Participants have the obligation to continuously monitor energy consumption and adopt energy management in order to look for continuous improvement in energy efficiency.

One of the key objectives of the Code of Conduct is that each participant benchmarks their efficiency overtime, using the Code of Conduct metric (or available alternatives) to have evidence of continuous improvements in efficiency.

More info: Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres