Research conducted at the Energy Summit, organised by DatacenterDynamics, indicates UK data centre owners and operators have issues including energy efficiency and corporate social responsibility firmly on their agenda. However, resilience and availability remain their key priorities.
Datacentre Energy Dynamics 2007 welcomed 400 owners and operators of datacentres and mission critical facilities as well as representatives from vendor organisations to London's Royal Lancaster Hotel on 28th February 2007.
A response to the increasing debate around environmental issues, the conference was DatacenterDynamics' first single subject event for five years. It focused upon the next big datacentre challenge', and sought to advance the cause of energy-efficient build and operational strategies.
Organised around three main presentation sessions each followed by questions and knowledge sharing moderated by an industry expert, Datacentre Energy Dynamics brought leading thinkers and policy makers face to face with an exacting audience of data centre professionals.
Research was conducted throughout the day to measure delegate attitudes towards the issues raised in the sessions and to evaluate the practical steps proffered in pursuit of energy efficiency. The completed sample includes 244 responses with the majority (65%) data centre owner-operators.
The research indicates firstly a sector with a very strong commitment to energy efficiency but not at the cost of resilience/availability. Prompted rankings indicate the latter as the first priority while efficiency is ranked fourth. Only 14.3% agree that resilience will be sacrificed to efficiency' while 71.4% disagree.
Yet the research indicates an industry that is firmly outward-looking. 77.9% agree that pursuing corporate social responsibility will make organisations more competitive, rather than less. 93.2% consider the data centre industry to hold major environmental responsibility.
Of the technological/engineering solutions considered during the day, IT architecture is considered to have the greatest promise - 76.2% agree that this can be further developed to provide high availability systems on N+1 infrastructure.
There was also consensus that the data centre industry needs to interact with external regulators to achieve energy efficiency (50.0%) rather than attempting to deal with the situation in isolation. The responsibilities of vendors, power companies and internal organisational process were also covered in the research.
A packed agenda
Three main sessions across the day were organised and included sixteen recognised experts representing Government (from the Greater London Authority and the UK Market Transformation Programme), benchmark end-user organisations (including HSBC and BT), engineering and consulting disciplines and power companies.
The first debate session presented delegates with an introductory scoping of the issues and future consequences of energy utilisation within the data centre industry. The second focused on practical opportunities for reducing data centre power loads and energy consumption and emphasised the application of theory to live data centre environments. The closing session looked at specific cutting-edge technologies including renewable energy, onsite power generation, fuel cells and distributed generation.
Datacentre Energy Dynamics represents the first of twenty-two events in thirteen countries as part of the 2007 DatacenterDynamics Global Series. In 2006, 5,194 data centre professionals attended thirteen DatacenterDynamics events, confirming the status of the conference series as the leading source of information and the largest gathering of professionals involved in the design, construction and operation of 24/7 mission critical IT facilities in the world's top business cities.
For more information on Datacentre Energy Dynamics and upcoming 2007 DatacenterDynamics events please visit www.datacenterdynamics.com.
To obtain a copy of the key findings of the research conducted at Datacentre Energy Dynamics please email George Rockett [[email protected]] or Nick Parfitt [[email protected]].