CREATE-NET and European Alliance for Innovation have organized a webinar on energy Efficient Data Centers on April 20, 2015. This live webinar is a ’pilot’ event in the context of innovation support services and on-site trainings starting from the 2nd half 2015 organized by INNOVER-EAST. The objective of the event was to open up new capacities for providing the innovation services in the Eastern Partnership Countries. The goal of this activity lies in assisting both researchers and business in improving their performance to manage the transfer of knowledge on energy efficient data centers from academy to industry and market. The webinar was arranged using WebEx tool and included a lecture, as well as a Q/A session.
The lecturer was given by Giovanni Giuliani affiliated by Hewlett-Packard Italy Innovation Centre. Giovanni is a master architect at the Innovation Centre and a technical coordinator of DC4Cities EU FP7 project. DC4Cities promotes the data centres role as an “eco-friendly” key player in the Smart Cities energy policies, and fosters the integration of a network of local renewable energy providers (also interconnected with local Smart Grids and Micro Grids) to support the pursued increase of renewable energy share. During the lecture Giovanni stressed the point that data centers could be considered from two stand points: fisrt, they are an ICT infrastructure supporting Smart Cities in terms of ICT services delivery to the citizens, and second, they are incredible energy consumers. To ensure the data centers smooth and ”eco” operation, enough renewable energy should be availble and delivered at the particular time by the renewable energy providers.
DC4Cities finds the adequate actions to run a data centre so as to adapt to external energy constraints and consume the minimal energy, targeting the 80% usage of renewable energy sources. The goal of DC4Cities is to make existing and new data centres energy adaptive, without requiring any modification to the logistics, and without impacting the quality of the services provided to their users. Finally new energy metrics, benchmarks, and measurement methodologies are developed and proposed for the definition of new related standards.
The webinar ended with a number of questions on how the data center owners and renewable energy providers prefer to act in terms of business contracts, what is the price and what efforts are required to scavenge the renewable energy, what are the challenges associated with the reneawble energy infrastructure.
The recording of webinar and video player are available for downloading.
