Industry and scientific experts join innovative European Commission green data centre project

A number of high-profile organisations have announced their support for the European Commission CoolEmAll project. Leading data centre technology suppliers, design engineers and scientific research organisations have now joined the project’s Advisory Board, bringing exceptional expertise in green data centres. Members now include CA Technologies, Future Facilities, Norland Managed Services, Carbon3IT, University of Notre Dame and University of Leeds.

CoolEmAll aims to increase understanding about the interaction between IT hardware, software (applications and workloads) and power/cooling systems within data centres. The initiative is developing a number of tools, blueprints, and other resources to help data centre designers, operators, and technology suppliers, to build and run more energy efficient facilities and equipment.

“This groundswell of support for CoolEmAll is enabling us to undertake R&D using some of the best minds in the industry and a wealth of resources. It is simply impossible for a single vendor or research body to conduct the necessary research on the scale required but by bringing together all these parties we can achieve our ambitious goals to cut data centre CO2 emissions and costs,” said Andrew Donoghue, senior analyst, 451 Research and CoolEmAll consortium spokesperson.

“These experts will help to ensure that the project delivers tools and research that are commercially and scientifically viable and help to push back frontier of efficient data centre design and operation. In return, we hope our research will also inform the product development, and research agendas of our advisory board members,” Donoghue added.

The Advisory Board members bring a range of expertise to the project:
Disruptive data centre technologies - CA Technologies, Future Facilities and Racktivity have all developed complementary tools in the fast growing datacentre infrastructure management sector. The University of Leeds is also investigating the potential of liquid cooling in data centres.

Data centre standards and industry initiatives - As well as contributing their expertise in commercial data centre projects, Norland Managed Services, Future Tech and Carbon3IT also have close links to the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres. Uptime Institute provides professional services, education and certifications for the data centre industry and manages a large network of data centre operators.

Cooperation with other EC projects - The University of Passau is one of the participants in another EC data centre project, All4Green.

CoolEmAll Project Advisory Board Members
Scientific advisors
· École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) - Dr Vincent Keller, applications analyst, CADMOS project
· INRIA (The French Institute for Research in Computer Science) - Dr Laurent Lefevre, permanent researcher
· University of Leeds – Dr Jon Summers, senior lecturer, School of Mechanical Engineering
· University of Notre Dame - Dr Paul Brenner, associate director, Center for Research Computing
· University of Passau - Prof. Dr Hermann de Meer, chair of Computer Networks and Computer Communications

Industry advisors:
· CA Technologies - Dhesikan Ananchaperumal, Distinguished Engineer & SVP for DCIM Technology
· Carbon3IT - John Booth, consultant
· Future Facilities - Hassan Moezzi, director, and other executives
· Future-Tech - James Wilman, sales and marketing manager
· Norland Managed Services - Mark Acton, critical product director
· Racktivity - Hans Witdouck, chief executive
· Uptime Institute - Phil Collerton, managing director, and Sylvie Neau Le Roy, Uptime Network director, EMEA

The role of the CoolEmAll Advisory Board is to:
· Provide regular external feedback on the development of the project
· Act as a forum for collaboration between experts
· Help source potential early adopters of the tools, and research, under development
· Find commercial and scientific partners for the future development of the final tools and research that result from the project.

CoolEmAll is also looking to connect with interested parties who may want to become early adopters of the software tools being developed within the project or contribute to the project in other ways.