Oslo, Norway, 16 September 2018: A progressive data centre must do what it can to reduce its environmental footprint, said Geoff Fox, Group Chief Innovation and Engineering Officer, DigiPlex Data Centres, while stressing on the importance of energy efficiency and the need for data centres to go Green. “Data centres today account for two per cent of the world’s annual CO₂ emissions and three per cent of its power consumption,” Fox said. “Hence, it is important for data centres to have a strategic long-term focus on sustainability and take up measures to combat global warming, which can be achieved only through innovation.”

Geoff Fox

Explaining how DigiPlex decided to run data centres on clean and renewable energy, Fox said, “The whole grid in Norway runs on renewable energy from hydro sources by harvesting rainwater.” The most effective mechanism, Fox said, is the air-to-air cooling mechanism. The technology, he said, capitalises on the cool atmospheric conditions of the Nordics to deliver efficient cooling.

Describing the role of technology in saving energy, Fox said, “The air-to-air technology enables energy savings of up to 25%, as compared to the industry average, globally.” Highlighting another innovation in the field of intelligence, he said that Concert Control, an application DigiPlex has introduced, uses an algorithm to optimise the performance of the company’s proprietary evaporative cooling system, thus controlling the provisions of the data hall, based on the electrical power consumed by the data servers.