The first Dutch data center to operate fully climate-neutral

Posted on: 23-04-2007

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EvoSwitch is a new carrier-independent datacenter based in Haarlem. The facility has a floor area of more than 9,000 square metres and a total capacity of 10 Megawatts. A special feature of this completely new facility it its energy-efficiency.

Datacenters are well-known for their high energy consumption. This is why AMD, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Intel and SUN recently established The Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org) – a consortium of ICT suppliers that strives for more efficient energy use by datacenters. Primarily, this is out of environmental considerations, of course, but also for the simple fact that the supply of energy is limited. The analysts at Gartner Research predict a worrying decrease in the amount of energy and cooling capacity available to datacenter customers. Which means that the energy costs for datacenter customers will increase further. Already, half of the operating costs of a datacenter is taken up by energy consumption. In the future, electricity will have an even stronger impact on prices.

20 percent energy savings
EvoSwitch is a step ahead of this development. Major investments have been made in cooperation with TNO – primarily in the field of cooling – in order to operate climate-neutrally. This has led to EvoSwitch being able to reduce energy consumption by at least 20 percent. For example, there’s been an investment in Free Cooling – an energy-efficient concept that makes handy use of cool outside air. And the temperature in Holland allows this for half of the year. Thanks to this, the compressor is largely unneeded for forty percent of the time, which makes a substantial difference to energy consumption.

In addition to this, EvoSwitch also uses the innovative Cold Corridor Concept. This is a specific method for cooling servers. With Cold Corridor, cold air is fed to the front of the servers while warm air is extracted efficiently at the back. This leads to no ‘short circuiting’ between the warm and cold air. EvoSwitch has also invested in an energy-efficient UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). This is an emergency power supply with Delta Conversion (supplied by APC) that conditions the power supply energy-efficiently and compensates for power outages in the electricity grid.

The benefits of being a newcomer
Because it’s a newcomer, EvoSwitch has been able to make considerable investments in energy-efficient systems. “Many of the existing datacenters were set up about seven years ago, in a period when energy consumption was not yet such a big issue,” says Laurens Rosenthal, Innovation Director of EvoSwitch. "The existing datacenters are in continuous operation, which makes it difficult to take real energy-saving measures, even though the current situation demands them."

"In many of the datacenters, measures are limited to using ‘green’ energy. We also buy ‘green’ energy from the DELTA power company, but we’ve gone much further. We’ve invested a lot in innovative, energy-efficient systems. And we operate completely climate-neutral.” This is why EvoSwitch has a Climate Neutral Certificate (www.climateneutralgroup.com). In exchange for the energy consumed at EvoSwitch, new trees are planted to compensate for the CO2 emissions.

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