Objective

The increasing proliferation of broadband connections and networks of firms supporting the outsourcing of data and computation time in data centers, has brought about their establishment as an integral part of today's IT infrastructure and have laid the ground, based on large parts of the Internet economy. eco began several years ago to establish the Datacenter Star Audit a quality standard that wouldl ensure, in this opaque market, transparency and security. Recently, data centers' energy efficiency efforts also increased in the media spotlight.

These developments gave eco the opportuniy to examine these and other issues in more detail in a newly created Working Group Data Centers.

The following are the objectives of the Working Group Data Centers:

• Development of best-practice approaches for different types of data centers (eg co-location centers, carrier and internal data centers worldwide)
• Open, confidential exchange of information between the data center operators
• Creating benchmarks for the industry