The Australian data center industry is in danger of suffering from ill-informed regulation, according to a fiery late-afternoon panel at the DatacenterDynamics' Asia-Pacific conference that took place June 16 in Sydney. 

Although postponed in Australia, carbon regulation will continue to be a strong driver for firms looking at the design of their data centers, but just cutting energy use could create the an illusionary sense of savings, according to Zahl Limbuwala, chairman of the Data Center Specialist Group at the British Computer Society.

“For me, the answer is actually to spend more energy in the data center, thus enabling efficiencies in other parts of the business,” he said. “I worked with a major UK supermarket chain who used increased IT power to take hundreds of thousands of litres of fuel out of its logistics operation.”

And carbon regulation – both at a national and a more local scale – could push data centers to move overseas to save on costs. This is the same effect Limbuwala has warned about his European and US audiences.

“We’re already seeing US banks looking to segregate parts of their systems to the US and Brazil where they can,” said James Dow, CTO at CS Technology, an IT-infrastructure strategy and implementation services firm.

Furthermore, EU's recently enacted carbon regulations that focuse on energy use alone actually drive bad practice, according to Ian Bitterlin, CTO at Prism Power, a manufacturer of switchgear systems.

“If you’ve been a good data center owner over the last few years and improved efficiency ... you’re screwed,” he said. “The best thing is to start inefficiently now and improve drastically over the next few years. That’s what the regulation encourages.”

In a recent tour of one facility, Bitterlin was told basic cooling technologies were not installed because they could be put in at a later date to show improvement.

In the US, a lack of capital, coupled with local and state regulations, is driving a trend of low-density data centers being constructed in outlying areas, according to Ron Hughes, President of the California Data Center Design Group, which provides design and engineering services.

“Data centers use power and water and they don’t employ (many) people, so some states are not friendly towards them in terms of regulation,” he said.

But will the surfeit of regulation in the EU and the US drive frustrated end-users to outsource? Possibly, but that may not be a good thing, according to Hughes.

“The assumption that outsourcers are more competent than doing it yourself isn’t always correct," he said "If it was me I’d be real careful what I outsource."