The European Commission has awarded a grant of €1.7 million to fund the data centre industry’s first major government-funded research and development programme.
The Pan-European DCA project (PEDCA) programme will provide an academy to devise and then implement a joint action plan for the data centre industry for the benefit of the industry in all EU member states. It will identify and validate the on-going research requirements for the data centre industry to facilitate future research funding, develop an independent sustainable research platform and leverage the expertise and skills of players within the industry throughout Europe and the world.
The initiative came about after the DCA identified that the data centre sector had never had the benefits enjoyed by most major industries of government funded research. The project will be led by the DCA and the University of East London (UEL) supported by a European consortium of academics, regional governments and industry.
"It seems incredible that a sector as important to the European economy as data centres, which every other sector now relies upon for its operations, has never had any independent government funded research into best practice, sustainability, energy reduction or training needs," said Simon Campbell-Whyte, executive director, DCA.
Every banking transaction, airline booking, online shopping transaction, factory scheduling, e-mail, tweet Google search or Facebook status update, explained Campbell-Whyte, involves at least one and often many data centres. And everything that is "in the cloud" is, in reality, in one or many data centres.
A great advantage that DCA brings to the project is that it is a truly independent industry body whose only agenda is the betterment of the industry. Members of the DCA are widespread: from commercial and enterprise data centre operators; universities and academia; suppliers, manufacturers and service providers plus individual data centre professionals.
PEDCA is an open projec and DCA is making its members’ portal accessible to all interested parties free of charge. Anyone in the data centre industry in the EU or throughout the world can offer to contribute to the research or track its progress by completing a registration at www.data-central.org
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