Ian is Vice President Operations of Colt Data Centre Services and is responsible for managing the operations of the Data Centre and Node estate for Colt Telecommunications. He has over 25 years experience in the data centre and telecommunications industry and has been engaged in delivering data centre services to customers since 1997. Ian has held various senior roles at Colt over the last 10 years, including heading up the technical design team that developed Colt’s Modular Datacentre offering and for managing UK sales for data centres and managed services. Previously he was Product Director at City Reach International, a data centre start up. Prior to this he managed application and web hosting line of business at BT responsible for bringing their first data centre hosting offerings to market.
Many of Europe’s data centres were designed and built 10+ years ago. A time when energy wasn’t very expensive and data centres were kept so cold, some may have considered storing their milk along with their servers.
Today, new data centres are designed with efficiency at the core – they are recyclable, can heat whole towns and run on fresh air (well almost!).
But the data centres of yesteryear are still running, keeping critical compute live and online. Many work perfectly well. With the mantra ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, many have remained largely untouched. But… what if every one of those data centres took relatively minor measures to improve efficiency?
Four years ago my team and I set out to do that very thing with Colt’s data centres. It turned into a systematic process of assess, identify, improve and track. We reduced our energy consumption by 18%, translated into Euros, that’s €4 million PER YEAR.
We had some major advantages: a specialist team with more than 100 years of experience between them ranging from minor works to major efficiency projects, across 20 data centres, which enabled us to hit the ground running.
Our key findings indicated that taking some relatively simple steps could improve energy efficiency in an older data centre by at least 5%. Apply this logic across all European data centres and you’re looking at €350 million. It’s there for the taking! To help you achieve it, we’ve put together a guide ‘12 Simple Steps to Improve Power Usage Efficiency’.
You may not get to pocket a share of €350 million, but your company will see massive benefits and a positive influence on the bottom line. Moreover, you will win international acclaim for your efforts to reduce power costs and save the planet. You might even get employee of the month!
Now, I’m off to get a ticket for the EuroMillions!
Please choose your country
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