It’s not often a data center technology vendor becomes a partner. The kind of business partner you can rely on to get where you are going (quickly), to have your back, and to go above and beyond when the path of least resistance offers easier options.
And yet this is exactly how we would characterise our relationship with EcoCooling – the kind of partner who became embedded in our business model and truly adds value to our next generation colocation data center located in Boden, Northern Sweden.
It’s only by having partners like EcoCooling we have been able to participate in the “creative destruction” of the colocation data center design orthodoxy and bring a new technical architecture and cost model to the market.
From the beginning we challenged EcoCooling hard and fast, and they have continued to exceed our expectations – both technically, operationally and from a client management perspective. There goes our procurement negotiation edge!
Cooling is a huge part of data center design and the largest contributor to overall data center efficiency. Supplying the correct volume and temperature of inlet air, de/humidification, air handling and air mixing, heat extraction, software development, hardware controllers – the list goes on – all contribute to Hydro66 and EcoCooling having developed together an enterprise-class colocation data center with a PUE of 1.07 and an incredible WUE of 0.08. We believe this is what the market needs, and our recent announcement that we are trebling our footprint is proof.
The close coworking required to produce extraordinary solutions cannot be underestimated. It’s very difficult (impossible?) to replicate in a traditional vendor/client relationship with formalised procurement procedures. And that’s part of the edge a market disruptor brings to make creative destruction possible. Going out to RFI and RFP to ‘build a datacenter’ results in slow-to-market vanilla ‘me-too’ solutions, and the world has enough of those!
This is where the value of our relationship with EcoCooling meets our client bottom line.
Hydro66 are unique in not charging a PUE overhead to colocation clients. Why can we do this? Simply put our 1.07 PUE means we can absorb a 7% inefficiency overhead. (Clue: start with the cheapest greenest electricity in the EU and build a massively efficient data center)
If your colocation data center provider charges you PUE it means they are too inefficient to absorb it AND remain competitive. For example if your data center PUE is 1.5 it means adding 50% to your electricity bill. Even if you are in-house (on-premise) hosted, its on someone’s budget line. The planet is not proud of wasting 50% of server electricity on cooling, and that’s assuming your electricity was properly green to start with – separate blog.
This is a significant factor in us being able to save clients at least 50% on their colocation costs. This becomes particularly important where for example an HPC (High Performance Computing) user needs a large amount of power. Today our standard rack design is 10KW and we are working hard on new designs to take this up much higher. Watch this space.
And so, we are delighted EcoCooling have taken the time to describe in some detail the journey they have been on with us (and others in the UK and the Nordics) to achieve breakthrough solutions in Nordic data centers. If you want to see what a great vendor/client relationship looks like, if you want to understand the bleeding edge of data center cooling technology or if you just have an unhealthy interest in how a truly innovative colocation data center can successfully adhere to ASHRAE guidelines, then please read on…
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/keeping-temperature-humidity-box-taking-cooling-emma-beresford/
We look forward to continuing the evolution of data center design with all of our partners and in particular EcoCooling. Sign up here for email updates or more information on Hydro66.