EN 50600 promotes sustainability
How do resource-hungry data centres and the European Green Deal fit together?
Data centres consume a lot of resources, especially electricity, water and coolants, and this consumption is driven by the increasing demand for IT services. It is therefore part of the daily business of a data centre operator to optimise facilities and infrastructures in terms of energy consumption and thus improve the environmental friendliness of the data centre.
In recent years, there have been a number of recommendations in the field of sustainability that address the variety of technical equipment and infrastructures used in data centres. What has been missing, however, is a normative approach that enables data centre operators to determine, verify and document the status of their measures on a recognised basis.
This gap is now history: thanks to CLC/TS 50600-5-1, the market now has the world’s first technical specification for a maturity model for energy management and environmental sustainability of data centres so that data centre operators can also make their contribution to the European Green Deal.
The CLC/TS 50600-5-1 maturity model takes into account the following elements: Management and reporting; building infrastructure, energy supply and distribution, environmental control infrastructure and ICT issues, including software, hardware, storage and networks. It is interesting to note that active IT equipment and software are also included here (i.e. the primary assets at a data centre site), as EN 50600 previously only addressed the so-called secondary assets of the basic data centre infrastructure.
More information is provided by CENELEC, the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation here.
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