ICT Energy Efficiency

Building a data centre in a conservation area!

Inside our data cenre

Around 30% of the electricity consumed by the University of St Andrews is used to power ICT equipment, much of which is powered 24 hours a day every day. With energy costs continuing to rise and our commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2016 we face a real challenge. Our initial efforts focussed on reducing the number of locations which house servers and storage by constructing a very energy efficient data centre. We continue to consolidate equipment and locations and are starting to enhance our efforts to reduce our ICT energy demands. Over the next year we will seek to optimise our data centre configuration to reduce our environmental impact further. I am very interested in pursuing the BCS CEEDA accreditation and will discuss this further soon.

These efforts are merely a starting point and we can all do more to reduce energy usage.