The News Green News Scotland to open its 'greenest' data centre yet through IFB/Dell partnership in Aberdeen
03 December 2009
Scotland is to get its "greenest" data centre so far as a result of a partnership between ISP and hosting firm IFB and Dell.
The £7m investment by IFB will see the cash spent on "Scotland's highest specification data centre", said IFB. The entire design "revolves around reliability, sustainability and efficiency, giving the data centre the ‘greenest’ footprint possible,” IFB promised.
The centre is being developed in partnership with Dell, which will provide the technology best practice and infrastructure design for the centre which will be based in Aberdeen.
Low power consumption, self generation of power from low carbon footprint sources, the use of low impact services including the removal of traditional UPS battery systems, and the reuse of waste by products - in particular heat - will be designed into the new centre.
The 14,000 sq ft IFB site will open during the second quarter of 2010 and will see IFB’s capacity grow ten-fold on the company’s current capacity. The centre will house new business continuity suites specifically for IFB clients.
Scotland is quickly becoming a hotbed for green data centres. The region's cold temperatures are providing naturally cold air to help cool data centre servers. In other planned projects backed by the Scottish government, strong tidal waters will be used to generate power for data centres, and hot air generated by other data centres will be used to heat additional public buildings.
The IFB centre will be the first in Scotland, and one of only four sites in the UK, to carry Uptime Institute Tier III certification to deliver maximum business continuity.
Operations director of IFB Graeme Gordon said, “The IFB centre will set a new standard for data centre design and customer facilities. We have the full support of Dell’s global infrastructure division for developing the technical design and future services."
Tim Webb, Dell’s head of global data centre optimisation services, said, “IFB’s new state of the art centre will help customers efficiently scale IT capacity while ensuring availability, reliability and environmental friendliness."
