The winners for the Data Centre World Awards 2023 were announced during a grand ceremony at Data Centre World on 8 March taking place at ExCeL London.
The awards recognised the people, innovations, and operations within the data centre industry that have gone above and beyond to achieve outstanding excellence in the sector.
In this category, Vertiv and EkkoSense (on behalf of Three UK) were 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.
WINNER: EkkoSense (on behalf of Three UK)
Most Successfully Delivered Data Centre
The two companies shortlisted for this award were 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.
WINNER: Vantage Data Centres
Green Data Centre of the Year
The shortlist for Green Data Centre of the Year included 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.
WINNER: CSC IOT Centre for Science
CBRE and Vantage Data Centres were 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.
WINNER: Vantage Data Centres
Environmental Product of the Year
Shortlisted for this award were 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.
WINNER: Interact.
Special Contribution to Improving Resilience Through Innovation
ICTS and Fireworks Fire Protection were 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.
WINNER: ICTS
Best Talent Developer
Shorlisted for Best Talent Develop were 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. The ten partners supporting the Digital Futures programme include CNet Training, Virtus Data Centres, CyrusOne, CBRE, Amazon Web Services, LMG, ARK Data Centres (Crown Hosting Data Centres Limited), Yondr, Kao Data and Soben.
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.
WINNER: UTC Heathrow and Partners
Speaking on the win, President and CEO of CNet Training, Andrew Stephens, said: “It is an amazing win for all of the partners, and the UTC and its students. It has been a long time in the making – I have been invested in it for the last six years – but to see everybody run up to the stage, to see how excited they are and to see the students jump up on stage, it really means a lot. It is a legacy we can be proud of – it is something we can build on and replicate – there is no excuse now for us not to have a talent pipeline. Congratulations to everyone who has been involved – it is brilliant and I am so proud.”
Innovation Product of the Year
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.
WINNER: QiO Technologies
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