EvoSwitch hosts The Green Grid EMEA quarterly meeting

EvoSwitch – the most sustainable, carbon-neutral datacenter in the Netherlands – is hosting the quarterly meeting of The Green Grid on the 15th and 16th of February.

The Green Grid is a global non-profit industry consortium that has been created to improve the energy efficiency of datacenters and enterprise IT infrastructures. During the meeting in Haarlem, the technical committee from the EMEA region will discuss future plans and developments for the organization.

Eric Boonstra, managing director of EvoSwitch said, "We're pleased to welcome The Green Grid for the meeting at our datacenter. Sustainability and reducing energy consumption are also on the list of 2012 industry priorities, including here at EvoSwitch. In view of the growing demand for data traffic, we are particularly looking to emphasize the importance of green entrepreneurship at our datacenter."

With more than 175 member companies, The Green Grid unites efforts in the field of environmental friendliness within the global datacenter industry. To improve energy efficiency, the organization develops technical and educational tools to improve the efficiency of datacenters. The Green Grid has introduced several metrics for this goal, including the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness), the WUE (Water Usage Effectiveness) and the ERE (Energy Reuse Effectiveness). 

Eric continues, "EvoSwitch has been particularly focused on sustainability and corporate social responsibility from the beginning. We therefore buy 100 per cent green power for our datacenter and operate energy-efficient cooling technologies to reduce our CO2 emissions as much as possible. We make ample use of the tools from The Green Grid to provide insight into our energy efficiency." 

Recently, EvoSwitch also began a partnership with TNO on a sustainability project called FlexiQuest. "With this project we aim to investigate whether we can also make our customers’ power - so-called ‘IT power’ - more energy-efficient."

According to Eric, green business does not only lead to environmental benefits, but also to considerable cost savings for datacenter operators: "We cannot emphasize enough that every investment in energy efficiency pays dividends for datacenters due to the large role energy bills play in determining costs. Green equals cost leadership and it's great to see that the market is becoming increasingly more aware of this."