CW+ Premium Content/Computer Weekly

UK public sector organisations are under constant pressure to consolidate and downsize their datacentres, with ever-dwindling budgets meaning they need to achieve more with fewer resources. For the past 36 months or so, the EU Commission-funded EURECA project has existed to lend public sector datacentre operators a hand with this work by helping them identify areas within their estates where cost savings could be made and environmental improvements achieved. This work has seen the organisation drafted in to assess more than 350 public sector datacentres in seven European countries and, in the process, help their operators save about 45 gigawatt hours of energy a year and €4.5-5m in annualised cost savings. “This is just the energy savings we know about,” says EURECA project co-ordinator Rabih Bashroush. “A lot of people take on our ideas from hearing about them at events, so we don’t know what the second- and third-level impacts of our work are.” With the project now drawing to a close, the team are sharing the insights they ...