EU Code of Conduct

The EU Code of Conduct was developed in close collaboration with the industry, including the British Computer Society (BCS). Signatories to the Code are expected to implement the Code of Conduct's energy efficiency best practice, meet minimum procurement standards, and annually report energy consumption. This could mean that companies decommission old servers, reduce the amount of air conditioning they use, or maximise the use of a server by running multiple applications.

The Code of Conduct aims to:

• develop a set of easily understood metrics to measure the current efficiencies and improvement going forward.
• Provide an open process and forum for discussion representing European stakeholder requirements. Produce a common set of principles to refer to and work in coordination with other international initiatives
• Raise awareness among managers, owners, investors, with targeted information and material on the opportunity to improve efficiency.
• Develop practical voluntary commitments which if implemented improve the energy efficiency of data centres and in so doing minimise the TCO.
• Determine and accelerate the application of energy efficient technologies, such as virtualization, hardware consolidation, load adaptive cooling, direct current power distribution etc.
• Foster the development of provisioning tools that promote energy efficient procurement practices.
• Support procurement, by providing criteria for equipment, and best practice recommendation
• Monitor and assess programs to properly determine both the progress and areas for improvement.
• Set energy efficiency targets, for public and corporate data centre owners and operators

The UK is the first country in the world to set legally binding targets for reducing Greenhouse gas emissions. In order to achieve its ambitious target of an 80% reduction in Greenhouse gasses by 2050, every industry has to play a part. Data centres are responsible for almost 3% of electricity use in the UK and this is expected to double by 2020. The UK Government's work through its Market Transformation Programme (MTP) was instrumental in the development of the Code, which should help save 4.7 million tonnes of CO2 over the next 6 years. This is equivalent to taking more than a million cars off the road.

iomart is already implementing 'best practise' in its data centres, where it can. For example, we have installed in our Nottingham Data Centre, the latest in heat new cooling down flow units which utilise seven per cent less power than the units they replaced. Hot Gas Re-Heat (HGRH) technology also allows the data centre to maintain the room temperature by recycling heat expelled by the servers. We are currently installing more power efficient UPS systems across the estate, and we offer full virtualisation services to our customers to ensure that every rack is fully utilised and optimised.

We could not undertake any of these actions if we were reliant on a third party to provide us with our data centre facilities. Just one more reason for us is having our own data centre estate.

You can download the EU Code of Conduct here.