A sensational selection of data centre pioneers and trailblazers have been shortlisted for the third annual Data Centre World Awards 2023, supported by Dunwoody LLP.
Taking place during Data Centre World on 8 March at ExCeL London, the Awards will celebrate the people, innovations, and operations within the data centre industry that have gone above and beyond to achieve outstanding excellence in the sector.
Following an incredible number of nominations, the esteemed judging panel have shortlisted two nominees in each of the eight categories.
Energy price hikes are hitting all industries, and data centres are no exception. This award recognises the efforts in delivering a more energy-efficient data centre through an approach, product, or system design.
In this category, Vertiv and EkkoSense (on behalf of Three UK) have been shortlisted.
Three UK worked with EkkoSense to secure initial cooling energy savings across four sites of 200KW, representing a 10-15% data centre cooling energy saving in just ten weeks.
In 2018, Vertiv and Telefonica announced a long-term global alliance to boost energy savings through customised infrastructure solutions. Vertiv provided Energy Savings as a Service (ESaaS) from initial site assessment to comprehensive maintenance services.
Most Successfully Delivered Data Centre
Data centres power the digital economy. The award for Most Successfully Delivered Data Centre celebrates the innovations, approach, and teamwork that demonstrates an improved delivery and total cost of ownership between inception and operation.
The two companies shortlisted for this award are 2bm and Vantage Data Centres.
2bm designed and built a data centre for the Medical Research Council of the London Institute of Medical Sciences (LMS), which is appended to Hammersmith Hospital.
In March 2021 Vantage was contacted by one of its strategic customers who urgently needed significant IT capacity in South Africa. A few months later, Vantage commenced the build of a major carrier-neutral data centre campus in Johannesburg (JNB11), its first in Africa. Delivery took place ahead of schedule in just 10 months, with zero lost-time incidents over 1.5 million working hours.
Green Data Centre of the Year
Sustainability in data centres is a growing demand by operators and end-users. This award recognises the efforts made to reduce emissions and demonstrate a life cycle approach of recycling and reuse.
The shortlist for Green Data Centre of the Year includes CSC IOT Centre for Science and Ekkosense (on behalf of Telehouse).
CSC is the hosting entity and data center provider for EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputer LUMI. The LUMI site in Kajaani, Finland was selected due to availability of vast amount of local renewable energy and ability to utilise excess heat in to town’s district heating system. While having the potential of reducing 12,400 tons of CO2 annually, LUMI is able to save up to 40% of electricity costs by selling the waste heat.
EkkoSense optimised the Telehouse North facility in London to provide real-time operational visibility needed to secure a 461 tonnes reduction in CO2 carbon emissions as well as a 10% cooling power reduction.
Meeting service level agreements is an incredibly important component of a data centre lease, as it successfully delivers the benefits of data centres to both operators and customers.
The winner of this award shows an operator’s continued service and performance whilst maintaining a legislative and compliance testing programme.
CBRE and Vantage Data Centres are shortlisted for Best Data Centre Operator.
In 2020, CBRE launched DCS Shield. This proprietary Risk & Reliability Program is aimed to have the highest impact on reducing risk and unplanned outages in a data center through a suite of unique processes, technology, assessments, and training.
Vantage CWL11 Cardiff meets global, national and regional demand for colocation and hosting, all from a highly scalable single site campus at pricing half that of London. Opened for business in 2010, CWL11 is a continuously evolving colocation data centre operated by Vantage Data Centers, which acquired the 50-acres site from Next Generation Data (NGD) in July 2020. There has not been a single outage since the facility was opened in 2009.
Environmental Product of the Year
Hardware and software innovations within a data centre are key to successfully reducing emissions and waste. The Environmental Product of the Year recognises a development or new product that positively contributes to making the world a cleaner and greener place.
Shortlisted for this award are Reconext and Interact.
Reconext has developed a process to increase overall circularity for used SSD drives. Incoming drives are put through an exhaustive testing process including full data erasure. If a unit fails and is deemed to be beyond economic repair, they remove the NAND chips. These modules are also then tested and data wiped. The NAND chips can the be remarketed as is or used in in the remanufacturing process for our Vivetronics brand SSD units.
Interact offers a machine learning tool that addresses these issues by balancing embodied carbon, materials usage, and energy efficiency to get the best net environmental outcome. Its recommendations enable data centre managers to achieve the same or greater amount of compute power, with drastically reduced server footprint and energy draw.
Special Contribution to Improving Resilience Through Innovation
Resiliency in the data centre ensures that critical computing services are provided to the end user even in times of failure. This award demonstrates the success of an approach, system arrangement, or design where these innovations deliver greater resiliency in a facility.
ICTS and Fireworks Fire Protection are shortlisted for their Special Contribution to Improving Resilience Through Innovation.
ICTS’ Viridian started out as a simple dashboard, but through extensive consultation with data centre clients, it expanded into something much bigger. Viridian brings data centres physical security solutions together in one single, customisable platform. Data streams are contextualised dynamically assess risk and calculate optimal service delivery paths based on live-threat data and operational activities. ICTS incorporates all site-specific security procedures, KPIs, and the SLA into Viridian.
Fireworks’ fire protection solutions for data centres are based on a powerful, compact pump connected via small-diameter 316-grade stainless steel pipes to a network of strategically located water mist nozzles. The range of detection systems provided by Fireworks include heat sensitive water mist nozzles, very early smoke detection (VESDA) and conventional point detection. In the event of fire, data centre’s HVAC systems can continue operating as usual, and only the water mist nozzles located at the point of fire are activated.
Best Talent Developer
Like many other sectors in the technology industry, data centres are facing a talent shortage, despite rapidly growing demands. This award celebrates the efforts made to develop talent or create a successful training and retention plan.
Shorlisted for Best Talent Develop are UTC Heathrow and Partners and Cundall Johnston & Partners LLP.
UTC Heathrow and Partners provides an education that encourages life-long learning by empowering students with transferrable engineering skills to become responsible engineers to meet the needs of the data centre sector today and tomorrow.
Cundall Johnston & Partners LLP is a multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy, delivering hyper-scale data centre projects for our global customers around the world. Cundall nominated their Critical Systems team, including Sulego Said, Tom Heywood and Erin Holmes.
Innovation Product of the Year
New products and developments keep data centres ahead of the digital curve, allowing new demands to be met swiftly and successfully. The Innovation Product of the Year applauds the efforts made to create solutions that help reduce costs, emissions, or waste.
EkkoSense and QiO Technologies are shortlisted for Innovation Product of the Year.
EkkoSoft Critical, EkkoSense’s unique software-driven, AI-enabled data centre performance optimisation solution removes thermal and power risks for data centres, but also cuts data centre cooling energy usage to unlock immediate carbon savings.
QiO Technologies are an industrial IoT AI software products company supporting energy-intensive and asset-heavy industrial sector companies to rapidly deliver on their sustainability and net-zero agenda.
Who will win? Find out at Data Centre World on 8 March at ExCeL London.
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