18 Oct 2011
A carbon neutral datacentre situated just outside Portsmouth, and built by Vancouver headquartered firm, Peer1 Hosting, went live yesterday.
The datacentre offers a PUE of 1.1, with 1.0 being completely carbon neutral.
The company claims the industry average is 1:8.
However the low PUE will not bring the cost down for companies using the datacentre, as might be expected, because Peer1 has invested in a cooling system provided by Excool and the cost will be passed onto customers.
The Excool system harnesses the natural cooling effect of air and water, uses a heat exchange system, low-energy fans and water atomisers.
"This service will suit companies that are under pressure to keep to their carbon reduction commitments," said Fabio Banducci, President and CEO of Peer1 Hosting in conversation with Computing.
The company has spent £45m on the datacentre, which will eventually comprise four PODS (or performance optimised datacentres).
The facility is 5,372 metres squared and has 11 Megawatts of available power and room for 20,000 servers. It also provides a direct link to a 10Gb fibre network which is managed by Peer1.
It is situated in Langstone Technology Park, Portsmouth, and will offer scalable managed hosting, dedicated hosting and co-location services to companies across London and the South East.
The datacentre has been built to a Tier 3 specification.
The company already has a data centre just off the M4 corridor, and 70 per cent of the customers using this will be migrated to the Portsmouth datacentre, where the company will now be able to provide two-site redundancy.
The data centre also offers biometric authentication, ultra sound technology and coordinated intruder alarms. Users also have the opportunity to work at the site as catering, Wi-Fi, conference rooms, a 150-seater auditorium and fitness centre are available.
The primary grid main for this area appears to be on "Flood Warning Area" maps publish by the UK Government, so nothing to worry about coz as soon as there is a flood the lights will go out to the whole segment which I guess will include the DC. When IBM had its disk drive plant at there (Brockhampton/Langston) it was a major concern, but then it was not a 24x7 operation. We had to work round the clock when our UK Gloucester operation almost lost the grid due to flooding a few years ago. Never again!
Posted by: James Gillespie 18 Oct 2011
Since when has a PUE of 1.0 been carbon neutral? Laughable! Whilst a PUE of 1.1 is difficult to believe (we will have to give that one to the marketing department at Peer 1) this like all sites will produce thousands of tonnes of carbon. This one will produce something in the order of 50,781 (metric ton) of carbon based on 11MW total draw. I am also sure that no site ever achieves its 'design' PUE (which is all this press release says) - let's see the real figures when live.
Posted by: Paul Forester 18 Oct 2011
Have your say on this article
Newsletters
Latest stories from Hardware
Latest videos
You may also like
Hardware jobs
Technology Patent Wars
Case studies from large organisations across all sectors
... And rich media, and flexible working, and peaks in traffic ...
Upcoming Events
Join us for this Computing web seminar, in which the Head of BI at the Co-operative Group Nick Colebourn will be explaining just how he reigned in the Group’s sprawling database estate and how significant savings were realised and data quality improved as a result.
Date: 31 May 2012
Time: 11:00 AM
Live June 13th 11:00am: Register now. During this web seminar we will be looking at the sorts of incidents that can bring data centres grinding to a halt and what can be done about them.
Date: 13 Jun 2012
Time: 11:00 am
Receive the latest jobs direct to your inbox
Are you being paid what you are worth?
