The ECO-Qube project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 956059
Running
The majority of discussions related to data centers and environmental impact are focused on large hyper-scale or co-location facilities. Most law-making focuses on setting rules for data centers above 50 or 150 kW in power capacity. At the same time, thousands of outdated server rooms below 50 kW are being ignored. These server rooms are located in hotels, hospitals, government offices, and across office buildings. They need to be visible, retrofitted, and modernized to avoid recreating infrastructure somewhere else.
With discussions on Edge computing growing more widespread, it shows the clear risk of recreating server rooms again, even though they are already widespread, often hidden inside existing buildings. These server rooms need to be visible and modernized, contributing to the heat demand of the building, adjusting power consumption as well as upgrading the underlying IT infrastructure software to support load-shifting and -balancing. Owners & IT service companies should unlock the capabilities of these sites, while regulators should ensure that these server rooms are enhanced to reduce their environmental impact, similar to the buildings themselves.
The ECO-Qube project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 956059