Due to the travel disruption caused by the Eyjafjallajokull volcanic cloud hovering over much of Europe earlier this year BroadGroups’ 6th annual Data Centre Europe conference had been delayed till 24th – 25th June in Sophia Antipolis near Nice, France. The event was attended by 500 executives from the data centre sector and taking centre stage was the expected talk of clouds and the emergence of private cloud adoption. BroadGroup introduced a major investigation into assessing Private Cloud and its impact on data centres, examining the technical, business and cultural issues that would-be adopters might face. While intriguing it was actually the re-emergence of green strategies and effective use of power in the data centre that dominated proceedings once again.

A special focus on the Green agenda had been addressed by some of the world’s leading experts in data centre business operations, technologies, and energy efficiency solutions and it was innovations here and a step-change in attitudes towards embracing ‘green’ that really caught the attention. The modular container-based data centre is revolutionising the way the enterprises add data centre capacity. Not only can it provide cost-effective instant capacity it’s a type of breakthrough solution that reduces capital expenditure and lowers cooling costs by as much as 40% - issues that resonate with all enterprises today. For the future, speakers offered insights into some of the data centre tools we’d be using to micro-manage energy efficiency as well a look at some of the R&&D trials of technologies like water-cooled chips and systems that would feed back excess energy back into heating homes.

Energy efficiency in the entire data centre infrastructure has become the priority for our industry and a convergence of expertise and responsibilities will see facilities management lead this drive. Facilities management can be e xpected to take overall responsibility for the billing and charging of power, but overall everyone should be concerned with reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency.