"Our investments in energy-efficient cooling systems in particular have brought about a drastic energy reduction,” says Laurens Rosenthal, Innovation Director at the EvoSwitch datacenter. “We made the investments on the basis of recommendations by the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, TNO. We’re very happy with the result but we’re not going to rest on our laurels.” "Generally speaking, ICT equipment still uses a lot of energy, even though the global energy supply is getting scarcer. Datacenters are notorious for their high energy consumption. That is why we want to shoulder our responsibilities as a datacenter. We want to continue to further develop ourselves as a ‘green’ datacenter and improve efficiency so that accommodating ICT equipment at EvoSwitch will become even more energy-efficient."

Sharing experiences
In addition to its founders, many more companies have now joined The Green Grid, including Cisco, Texas Instruments, EMC, Novell, Juniper Networks and Fujitsu Siemens. EvoSwitch expects to be able to share knowledge and experiences with the various members.

"On the one hand, we want to share our own experiences with other members of the Green Grid,” says Rosenthal. "Our experience with energy-efficient systems at EvoSwitch can probably help manufacturers to take further energy-efficient measures. On the other hand, we expect to get innovative insights into new, energy-efficient technological developments. For example, one of the founders of The Green Grid, APC, has already made great advances with Delta Conversion, a technology that allows a UPS to consume a lot less energy. We have had this technology installed but I imagine that there are other developments in datacenter infrastructure. We’d like to get to know about these too."
Not just a matter of ethics

EvoSwitch is glad that there are more ICT companies emphasising the importance of an energy-efficient approach in datacenters. “It’s good if the ICT industry takes a collective responsibility and handles energy more economically,” says Rosenthal. “Energy saving leads to fewer emissions of harmful substances and thus to cleaner air. It also ensures that we will be able to keep our ICT infrastructures affordable and running in the future. In that sense, energy saving is not just an ethical choice – it’s a must, because the ICT industry uses a lot of energy while our energy capacity is by no means infinite. At EvoSwitch, we have sufficient energy stocks because we’ve made good purchasing agreements with our energy suppliers, but there is also such a thing as a collective responsibility for a social issue."