<div dir="ltr">Dear RIPE chair,HelloI am planning to send this to the RIPE List but thought to check with you first. Please kindly let me know if you have any reservations or comments. My name is Yousef Naimi, Data Center Manager of Asiatech (AS43754).As an engineer who has been in IT industry for over 10 years, I was wondering why the RIPE doesn’t have a separate working group for Data Center Management and Issues.After having a cheking how to move forward with this idea with RIPE NCC staff at MENOG 18, I learned how the process for having a BoF works and here is my request to have one at RIPE 77. At first, it may look that the Data Center WG has might overlap with other WGs like connect, but there are lot of issues related to the data center world that RIPE does not cover in its current WGs.Here are some examples: • Automation and SDN, we need to discuss the road towards software-defined data centers as well as the way we incorporate automation and AI into our operations for optimal efficiency and transparency in real-time. How awesome that would be to share ideas about how can AI improve uptime and efficiency in data centers? What are the various AI applications available to improve our data system? (EPMS, DCIM, BCMs, BMS)• Data Center Architecture and emerging networks, there are lots of organizations/teams which are working on data center policies and network architectures in order to meet increasing demands of growing contents/applications. Some of these orgs are as:ü <a href="http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/" target="_blank">http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/</a>ü <a href="https://tmt.knect365.com/data-center-world/" target="_blank">https://tmt.knect365.com/data-center-world/</a> The proposed WG can compile and act as a bridge between these venues and RIPE:• Data Center policies towards content, after all these years of centralization and decentralization of contents all over the world, governments are more concerned about reducing their budgets on building/maintaining data centers by integrating and merging several data centers into fewer ones. The project FDCCI (Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative) in USA and similar projects in other countries shows how important this matter is. On the other hand, how we can identify the early signs that offloading some of our data congestion to the edge will be necessary? What kind of data should be taken to the edge and what are the latest applications and use cases for edge deployments?• Data Center Services pricing, we are still in the middle of the challenge that whether the data center owner has to charge content owners or if the content owner has to charge the end user for using its content in order to make the deal fair for all sides. However, we all are aware of pricing Colocation service or dedicated server or IXP interconnection/cross-connection services, but talking about new cloud-based services, we have not much clear method to distinguish costs/benefits of IaaS/SaaS/PaaS services. That would be awesome if we could share best practices from economical point of view. So, my question is what others think about this? Should we have a BoF at RIPE 77 in Amsterdam and explore this further? If there is support for the BoF, then we can see how it goes and possible propose formation of a new WG. I’d appreciate if I get opinion of others on this. <div>Best Regards</div><div>Yousef Naimi</div></div>