Data centres have a notoriously high demand of resources: the massively increasing demand for IT services of all kinds continues to lead to rising consumption of electricity, water and refrigerants. Therefore, it is 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 sustainability of the data centre.
In the past few years, a series of recommendations on the field started to be developed, reflecting the diversity of technical facilities and infrastructures deployed in data centres. What was missing until now, though, was a normative approach to allow data centre operators to determine, verify and document the status of its measures on a recognised basis.
From now on, this gap is history: thanks to newly released CLC/TS 50600-5-1, the world's first technical specification for a maturity model for energy management and environmental compatibility of data centres is now available to the market.
This specification enables data centre owners and operators to:
employ a framework to baseline their data centre design and practices;
determine the level of maturity applicable to their data centre;
identify relevant guidance on potential areas of improvement together with the anticipated benefits to justify the resources required;
develop an action plan to migrate to higher maturity levels.
The maturity model of CLC/TS 50600-5-1 addresses the following elements: Management and operational information; Building, Power supply, distribution and environmental control infrastructure; and ICT issues including Software, hardware, storage and networking.
There are five levels applicable to each one of these elements, with a progression from Level 1 to Level 5.
To determine the maturity level of a given data centre, the model refers to the practices applicable in the specific case, outlined in previously published CLC/TR 50600-99-1 and CLC/TR 50600-99-2. As the practices of CLC/TR 50600-99-1 are aligned with the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres’ Best practices, it can be expected that the maturity model of CLC/TS 50600-5-1 will be rapidly adopted by data centre operators.
Starting from June 2022, also a German language version will be made available. CLC/TS 50600-5-1 was developed by CLC/TC 215 ‘Electrotechnical aspects of telecommunication equipment’, whose Secretariat is held by DKE. was also triggered by a suggestion of The Green Grid, a global data centre industry initiative.