The 9th EURECA Workshop was held in Barcelona on 9-10 May, 2017. The EURECA project is supported by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, and Green IT Amsterdam is one of the project partners.
The mandate of the EURECA project is to remedy the lack of awareness and information that would support the public sector procurement of environmentally sound data centre products and services. The public sector is the focus because of its potential for impact: there are more than 250,000 public authorities in the EU.
The project has resulted in the development of the EURECA Tool, which is a “web-based platform to help public procurers and data centre professionals self-assess the energy efficiency and profile of their data centres.” The Tool provides users with suggestions for improvements they could make. It draws on the Data Centre Maturity Model and the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres, and can be accessed by creating an account at: https://tool.dceureca.eu
During the workshop, members of the project team and project partners held seven sessions, each explaining the content and how to use sections of the EURECA Tool, e.g. “Data Centre KPIs and standards”, “Data Centre contracts aand risks”, “Tendering”, and, “The Data Centre Maturity Model”. These sessions were informative and easy to follow. Key takeaways included using measurements such as life cycle assessment / life cycle costing / total cost of ownership to capture the hidden costs and impacts of IT, and avoiding potentially misleading indicators such as PUE and CUE.
Interspersed with the Tool training sessions were presentations from a series of guest speakers, highlighting their own innovation and sustainability initiatives. From these speakers, I learned more about organizations and initiatives such as:
The Green Grid, a global consortium of organizations aiming to improve the energy efficiency of data centres
RenewIT, a project developing a simulation tool to evaluate the energy efficiency of different technical solutions
ECO2 Clouds, a project aiming to reduce the environmental impact of cloud computing
ASCETiC, a similar project but with software developers as its target audience
Amsterdam Smart City, Amsterdam’s innovation platform
The next EURECA workshop is planned for the autumn of 2017, and will be announced on the website
Sarah Vowles
Zurich, June 2017
