News

Datacentre energy efficiency and green IT

• April 20, 2021 20 Apr'21

  Inside a Microsoft Azure datacentre: Cloud giant invites users on server farm virtual tour

  Software giant wants to give users a ‘tangible view’ of the inner workings of its public cloud through a newly launched virtual tour experience

• April 07, 2021 07 Apr'21

  Digital Realty expands Singapore footprint

  Digital Realty opens its third and largest datacentre in Singapore to meet the needs of local and multinational companies that are looking to deploy critical infrastructure and scale their digital business

• March 23, 2021 23 Mar'21

  Scottish government embarks on green datacentre investment push

  The Scottish government is on a mission to position Scotland as a green datacentre hub as part of a push to boost the country's economy and achieve its net-zero emissions goal by 2045

• March 19, 2021 19 Mar'21

  AWS rolls out clean energy initiative in Singapore

  62MW solar project expected to generate 80,000MWh of clean energy a year, enough to power more than 10,000 homes

• March 17, 2021 17 Mar'21

  PagerDuty expands European datacentre presence with help from AWS

  Company is expanding its datacentre presence within Europe through its longstanding technology partnership with Amazon Web Services

• March 17, 2021 17 Mar'21

  Google Cloud shares carbon-free datacentre energy usage stats with users

  Public cloud giant publishes details of its Carbon Free Energy Percentage metric that it hopes companies will use to inform their decisions about where best to run their workloads for sustainability reasons

• March 16, 2021 16 Mar'21

  NEXTDC debuts carbon-neutral colocation service

  Australian datacentre operator will buy carbon offsets to help organisations reduce their carbon footprint through a new colocation service

• March 15, 2021 15 Mar'21

  Research: Continuous upgrades to datacentre virtualisation setups key to curbing carbon emissions

  A VMware-commissioned report by Aurora Energy Research highlights environmental benefits that can be attained by operators taking steps to continually improve their datacentre virtualisation setups

• March 11, 2021 11 Mar'21

  OVHcloud datacentre fire: Efforts underway to bring affected cloud customers back online

  OVHcloud confirms it is has reserved capacity at other datacentres, and is preparing to ramp up in-house production of its servers to bring its customers back online as soon as possible

• March 10, 2021 10 Mar'21

  OVHcloud confirms no casualties following fire at Strasbourg datacentre campus

  Local media reports suggest websites across Europe have gone offline in the wake of the blaze at OVHcloud’s datacentre campus in Strasbourg, France

• March 02, 2021 02 Mar'21

  HPE called in to overhaul Swedish university’s supercomputing setup

  The Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing has commissioned HPE to build a supercomputer for one of Sweden’s largest technical universities

• March 02, 2021 02 Mar'21

  CBRE predicts 2021 will be record-breaking year for European colocation demand

  Latest quarterly market tracker report from CBRE paints a positive picture of how the growth of the European colocation market is set to proceed in the years to come

• February 26, 2021 26 Feb'21

  Amsterdam to open environmental talks with datacentres

  City authorities and datacentre operators will open dialogue about sustainable datacentre industry expansion in the Dutch capital

• February 25, 2021 25 Feb'21

  Atos and HDF Energy to build ‘green hydrogen-powered’ datacentre by 2023

  French IT services giant joins forces with green hydrogen power expert to bring to market a ‘first-of-its-kind’ datacentre by 2023

• February 17, 2021 17 Feb'21

  Defra to lead creation of cloud-focused IT sustainability standard for use across government

  Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs continues its work to help government departments clean up their IT supply chains by creating a ‘cloud sustainability’ workstream

• February 15, 2021 15 Feb'21

  Wellcome Sanger Institute embarks on cost-saving energy efficiency drive at Cambridge datacentre

  The Wellcome Sanger Institute has enlisted the help of long-standing tech partner EfficiencyIT to oversee a revamp of its datacentres’ energy monitoring and management systems

• February 15, 2021 15 Feb'21

  Power supply shortages in colocation hubs pile pressure on datacentre operators to go green

  As demand for colocation capacity continues to soar in datacentre hubs, operators are coming under increasing pressure to go green, say Telehouse Europe panel participants

• February 10, 2021 10 Feb'21

  £2bn Zero Carbon Delivery Framework goes live to help public sector datacentres go green

  A four-year, £2bn procurement framework geared towards helping public sector organisations decarbonise their operations has gone-live

• February 10, 2021 10 Feb'21

  Ducati and Lenovo extend long-standing MotoGP technology deal

  Ducati and Lenovo have signed another three-year deal that will see the MotoGP team dig deeper into its technology partner's product portfolio in pursuit of performance gains on the track by embracing virtual desktops, HPC and edge computing

• February 03, 2021 03 Feb'21

  Google grows cloud sales as parent’s profits top $40bn

  Alphabet announces massive overall profits and increased Google cloud sales

• January 29, 2021 29 Jan'21

  IBM, Apple and Accenture join MIT cross-industry climate change-tackling consortium

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s cross-industry push to tackle climate change has attracted some big names from the world of tech, including Apple, IBM, Accenture and Verizon

• January 21, 2021 21 Jan'21

  Microsoft teams up with UK startup to minimise impact of climate change by aviation industry

  Cambridge-based startup Satavia is tapping into the Microsoft Azure public cloud platform to help aviation industry minimise the impact its activities have on the environment

• January 21, 2021 21 Jan'21

  Cloud and datacentre giants unite to create climate neutral EU datacentre industry by 2030

  Major players from the world of public cloud and colocation have joined forces with trade associations from across the continent to create a climate neutral datacentre industry by 2030

• December 29, 2020 29 Dec'20

  Top 10 datacentre stories of 2020

  Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 datacentre stories of 2020

• December 14, 2020 14 Dec'20

  CIO interview: Why IATA is banking on cloud to help the airline industry weather the Covid-19 crisis

  The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the International Air Transport Association to re-evaluate its IT investment priorities as the aviation industry shifts its focus away from business growth to business survival

• December 10, 2020 10 Dec'20

  Amazon goes public with record-breaking renewable energy generation plans

  Online retail giant Amazon has followed up earlier pledges to do more as a global organisation to tackle climate change by going public with plans to add a further 26 solar and wind farms to its portfolio

• December 10, 2020 10 Dec'20

  Arm to downsize global datacentre footprint through AWS cloud collaboration

  British semi-conductor maker Arm has committed to shrinking the size of its global datacentre estate by 45%, and plans to do so by moving some of its core chip design workloads to the AWS cloud

• December 03, 2020 03 Dec'20

  Tech and data key to achieving low-carbon economy, says Royal Society

  Report says net-zero transition should be data-led, and calls for coordination between government, regulators, industry and third sector

• November 18, 2020 18 Nov'20

  Nokia Software embarks on ‘carbon negative’ datacentre revamp push with HPE Greenlake

  Global telecoms giant Nokia Software opens up about the work it is doing to improve the environmental friendliness of the R&D datacentres underpinning its 5G innovation

• November 16, 2020 16 Nov'20

  Space DC eyes Indonesia datacentre market

  Space DC opens first of two datacentres with reliability and green features to tap Indonesia’s growing demand for datacentres

• November 09, 2020 09 Nov'20

  French bank Crédit Agricole backs immersion cooling for datacentre scale-up push

  Following the completion of a successful two-year pilot project, Crédit Agricole has confirmed it is preparing to roll out Asperitas immersion cooling technology to more sites within its datacentre portfolio

• November 09, 2020 09 Nov'20

  IT Priorities 2020: Covid-19 accelerates cloud investments by UK IT leaders

  The updated 2020 IT Priorities Survey from Computer Weekly and TechTarget shines a light on how the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has reshaped IT leaders’ technology investment plans

• November 03, 2020 03 Nov'20

  OVHcloud doubles down on sustainability with carbon reduction pledges

  OVHcloud emerges as the latest cloud provider to reinforce its commitment to ensuring the growth of its business does not come at the expense of the environment

• October 23, 2020 23 Oct'20

  Datacentre sustainability a work in progress in ASEAN

  Sustainability efforts have not kept pace with the growing demand for datacentre and co-location services in Southeast Asia

• October 14, 2020 14 Oct'20

  Interxion invests in growing its Austrian colocation presence with Vienna campus expansion

  Digital Realty-owned colocation giant Interxion is continuing to build out its European datacentre footprint, having acquired a parcel of land in Vienna to expand its Austrian server farm footprint

• October 14, 2020 14 Oct'20

  CyrusOne to prioritise water preservation across global colocation estate in sustainability push

  Global colocation giant makes good on its promise to publish first sustainability report into its operations, which contains commitments to curb the amount of water its facilities consume locally

• October 12, 2020 12 Oct'20

  H&M Group signs multi-year colocation deal with Swedish eco-friendly operator in sustainability push

  Clothes retailer H&M has signed a hosting deal, covering all of Northern Europe, with green datacentre operators EcoDataCenter, as its sustainability push continues apace

• October 09, 2020 09 Oct'20

  Datacentre sustainability tipped to become competitive differentiator for colo community by 2023

  Schneider Electric marks 2020 Innovation Summit with release of joint report with 451 Research into global datacentre market’s attitudes towards sustainability

• September 29, 2020 29 Sep'20

  Sustaining Google Cloud: How Covid-19 and green issues are shaping enterprise take-up across Europe

  Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian marks the start of the firm’s five-week EMEA-focused user conference by discussing how the coronavirus is affecting enterprises’ digital transformation priorities

• September 23, 2020 23 Sep'20

  CyrusOne goes public with pledge to become carbon-neutral provider by 2040

  Global colocation provider CyrusOne has pledged to become a carbon-neutral operator by 2040

• September 15, 2020 15 Sep'20

  Microsoft hails heightened reliability of servers run in sub-sea datacentres

  Microsoft concludes multi-year research project into practicalities of running underwater datacentres with positive findings about the sustainability and reliability of sub-sea server farms

• September 15, 2020 15 Sep'20

  BP and Microsoft extend cloud deal with clean energy agreement

  Companies aim to join forces to provide clean energy for Azure datacentres, smart cities and other energy consumers

• September 14, 2020 14 Sep'20

  Google commits to sustainability and erasing its carbon footprint

  Tech giant Google will develop tools to help datacentre managers measure and reduce the company’s carbon footprint

• August 19, 2020 19 Aug'20

  Equinix confirms review under way into UPS failure at Docklands datacentre

  Colocation giant says it is undertaking a review into the power outage that blighted users of its Docklands facility to guard against it occurring again

• August 12, 2020 12 Aug'20

  Beyond.pl plots Polish datacentre campus expansion to capitalise on growing continental cloud demand

  Polish colocation provider Beyond.pI says expansion plans are in direct response to growing demand for sustainably powered datacentre capacity in central Europe

• August 06, 2020 06 Aug'20

  Octopus Energy selects AWS as cloud provider to power its global expansion plans

  UK-based energy market challenger Octopus Energy has named Amazon Web Services as its preferred cloud provider, as it gears up for further global expansion

• August 05, 2020 05 Aug'20

  Egypt’s datacentre plans take key step forward

  Government lays the foundations for a datacentre industry with its new data protection law

• July 30, 2020 30 Jul'20

  Costs incurred by 'major' datacentre outages continue to rise, Uptime Institute research shows

  The Uptime Institute's latest datacentre market survey reveals major outages are costing operators more to bounce back from

• July 27, 2020 27 Jul'20

  NGD’s mega-colocation campus in Wales acquired by Vantage Data Centers

  US-based colocation firm continues its European expansion by snapping up Next Generation Data’s Newport campus

• July 22, 2020 22 Jul'20

  Microsoft targets diesel backup power to reduce emissions

  As it pushes towards becoming carbon neutral, Microsoft has started to look at how it can replace backup power generators in its datacentres

• July 21, 2020 21 Jul'20

  BMW Group signs six-year HPC contract with eco-friendly Swedish colocation firm

  Motor manufacturer agrees to double-down on its use of EcoDataCenter's environmentally friendly colocation facilities

• June 23, 2020 23 Jun'20

  SoftIron aims at data too valuable for commodity storage

  UK array maker hopes to be the storage provider of choice for those that really value their data, with highly optimised Ceph-powered hardware aimed at HPC users and enterprises

• June 18, 2020 18 Jun'20

  Datacentre investment boost as Norway’s government reinstates tax relief

  Government reinstates datacentre energy tax relief for cryptocurrency mining organisations after investments in the country’s datacentres drops

• June 10, 2020 10 Jun'20

  Google partners with WWF Sweden to dig even deeper into fashion industry's sustainability habits

  Google is doubling down on its efforts to support the fashion industry in cleaning up the environmental friendliness of its supply chains through its partnership with WWF Sweden

• June 09, 2020 09 Jun'20

  Netherlands digital sector yearns for government recognition

  The sector building and supporting the Netherlands’ digital infrastructure wants to be valued as highly as Schiphol airport and the port of Rotterdam are for the Dutch economy

• June 09, 2020 09 Jun'20

  Kao Data courts hyperscale tenants for Harlow-based mega-datacentre

  Kao Data rolls out ‘built-to-suit’ service for prospective hyperscale clients, that it claims will speed up the time it takes to bring online new datacentre capacity in a cost-effective way

• June 04, 2020 04 Jun'20

  OVHcloud brings healthcare-focused private cloud offering to UK market

  French infrastructure-as-a-service provider OVHcloud is making its sector-specific portfolio of private cloud and bare metal services available to UK-based healthcare providers

• June 03, 2020 03 Jun'20

  Interxion cuts energy cooling costs by 20% in West London datacentre through EkkoSense deployment

  Digital Realty-owned Interxion said deployment’s success will pave the way for similar roll-outs of EkkoSense technology in other facilities within its portfolio across Europe

• May 11, 2020 11 May'20

  AWS vs Microsoft: US JEDI contract dispute develops into war of words between tech giants

  Amazon and Microsoft are embroiled in a ‘battle of the blogs’ over the former’s continued efforts to get its claims that it lost out on a major US cloud contract due to ‘significant political interference’ fully investigated

• May 06, 2020 06 May'20

  Sustainability credentials of underground datacentre in Norway lure green investment fund

  Norway’s Lefdal Mining Datacenter has designs on becoming Europe's largest server farm, and its green credentials have secured further investment to help it reach its goal

• May 04, 2020 04 May'20

  Digital Realty doubles down on sustainability with pledge to cut carbon emissions by 2030

  Colocation giant Digital Realty is embarking on a 10-year, business-wide carbon emissions reduction quest, led by climate science

• April 24, 2020 24 Apr'20

  Dark data is contributing to carbon emissions

  Almost six million tonnes of carbon dioxide will be pumped into the atmosphere this year as a result of dark data, Veritas research finds

• April 23, 2020 23 Apr'20

  Datacentre M&A closed deal values exceed last year’s total just three months into 2020

  Latest market tracker data shows rebound in datacentre M&A deal values as enterprises look to outsource more of their IT and move to the cloud

• April 22, 2020 22 Apr'20

  Google creates datacentre task scheduler to limit non-urgent work to peak renewable energy periods

  Google lifts lid on how it is using forecast data to ensure non-urgent compute workloads within its datacentres are carried out at peak supply times for renewable energy

• April 07, 2020 07 Apr'20

  Coronavirus: Microsoft Azure suffers datacentre capacity shortages in Europe

  Microsoft is working to “expedite” additional datacentre capacity after reports of users struggling to access resources due to coronavirus demand surge. But how easy will that be amid a global pandemic?

• March 25, 2020 25 Mar'20

  DCMS creates datacentre-focused resiliency team to keep UK online during coronavirus outbreak

  Tech trade body TechUK reveals further details of the work going on behind the scenes at government level to ensure datacentre operators have access to the resources they need to cope with the surge in businesses and consumers accessing online ...

• March 25, 2020 25 Mar'20

  Global spend on enterprise datacentre kit and private clouds down 1% in 2019

  Market tracker data from Synergy Research Group reveals continued decline in spending on private datacentres, while investments in kit destined for use in public cloud facilities continues to soar

• March 23, 2020 23 Mar'20

  Coronavirus: Sellafield workers ordered to stay home as ‘controlled shutdown’ of site accelerates

  Staff email warns that “decisions” made now in response to coronavirus pandemic could have far-reaching consequences for ongoing efforts to decommission former nuclear power plant

• March 23, 2020 23 Mar'20

  Coronavirus prompts cross-industry collaboration from datacentre operators to keep UK online

  TechUK positioning document reveals datacentre operators are putting their competitive differences aside to share best practice on how to keep staff safe and keep the UK online during the coronavirus outbreak

• March 18, 2020 18 Mar'20

  Covid-19: Uptime Institute advises operators to suspend non-essential datacentre projects

  Datacentre resiliency think-tank issues 18-page guidance to help operators protect staff during the coronavirus pandemic while keeping their facilities ticking over

• March 12, 2020 12 Mar'20

  Virtus confirms Q2 go-live date for next two datacentres, as expansion plans gather pace

  Virtus Data Centres is making good on its datacentre expansion plans, which have been previously billed as among the biggest construction projects ever embarked upon by a colocation provider

• March 10, 2020 10 Mar'20

  University of Hertfordshire and Goonhilly hail deep learning-led UK mapping data breakthrough

  Tech tie-up paves the way for creation of UK mapping data that is free from cloud cover for the first time

• February 28, 2020 28 Feb'20

  Greenpeace urges AWS, Google and Microsoft to cut cloud ties with oil and gas customers

  Environmental group wants three of the public cloud market’s biggest players to stop selling their technology to oil and gas companies – but will they?

• February 20, 2020 20 Feb'20

  Executive interview: Making IT sustainable

  Defra recently reported that “cloud-first” IT strategies are driving green information and communications technology in government. This puts a greater emphasis on datacentre transparency

• February 18, 2020 18 Feb'20

  Amazon employee activists dismiss Jeff Bezos’ $10bn pledge to combat climate change

  Outspoken environmental activists working at Amazon dismiss CEO’s $10bn climate change pledge by pointing out firm’s ties to oil and gas market

• January 27, 2020 27 Jan'20

  Private equity players fuelled record number of datacentre mergers and acquisitions in 2019

  While the number of deals being struck in the datacentre market hits new highs, the average deal size shrinks for the second year in a row

• January 24, 2020 24 Jan'20

  HPE joins Swiss-backed bid to 'decarbonise' datacentres across the world

  HPE has joined forces with tech leaders and academics in Switzerland to support the take-up of a datacentre accreditation geared towards improving the energy efficiency of server farms worldwide

• January 20, 2020 20 Jan'20

  Modern telecoms has opened up Sweden’s far north

  Modern telecom infrastructures mean datacentres can be further away from users, and environmental and cost advantages are to be had in locations such as Sweden’s far north

• January 17, 2020 17 Jan'20

  Davos 2020: Why IT sector must address climate issues

  Climate change is set to be top of the agenda at the World Economic Forum, with Microsoft chief Satya Nadella declaring he aims to delete the company’s emissions

• January 14, 2020 14 Jan'20

  What is behind Stockholm’s datacentre boom?

  Datacentres are springing up in Stockholm – but what is drawing major IT companies to the Swedish capital?

• December 27, 2019 27 Dec'19

  Top 10 datacentre stories of 2019

  Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 datacentre stories of 2019

• December 04, 2019 04 Dec'19

  AWS fleshes out edge computing strategy with hyper-local datacentre hubs planned in major cities

  Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to supplement its ‘mega’ datacentre regions with smaller cloud data processing hubs in major cities to support enterprises requiring low-latency connections to its compute and storage resources

• December 03, 2019 03 Dec'19

  AWS plans renewable energy project in Australia

  AWS’s renewable energy project in Australia is one of six projects that the cloud supplier is spearheading to reduce its global carbon footprint

• November 18, 2019 18 Nov'19

  How DBS is pushing the limits of IT efficiency

  Besides shrinking its datacentre footprint by 75%, Singapore’s DBS Bank is running twice as many virtual machines on a single socket and decoupling applications from its infrastructure stack

• November 05, 2019 05 Nov'19

  TechUK calls on datacentre sector to scale up climate change action efforts

  Tech trade body TechUK claims the datacentre sector must do more to tackle climate change, and assist the government with its pledge to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050

• November 05, 2019 05 Nov'19

  Best of VMworld 2019 Europe User Awards: The winners

  Find out who won what, including the best of show prize, at the 2019 VMworld Europe User Awards in Barcelona

• October 25, 2019 25 Oct'19

  Defra sustainable ICT paper highlights datacentre water crisis

  A new paper on sustainable ICT published by Defra in conjunction with the IT industry has identified the areas of e-waste that need urgent attention

• October 22, 2019 22 Oct'19

  Assessing the aftermath of Apple’s abortive effort to build its Irish datacentre

  The site Apple had earmarked as a prime location for one of its first non-US datacentres is up for sale, but what will become of the site and the community that supported the tech giant through its four-year battle to get the server farm built?

• October 16, 2019 16 Oct'19

  Government IT hosting providers fail to provide emissions data

  Cloud computing is driving the government’s IT and sustainable tech strategy, but cloud and hosting providers are unable to divulge emissions data

• October 08, 2019 08 Oct'19

  All change: How big data could shake up cloud strategies and fuel demand for edge environments

  As enterprise data volumes continue to grow and grow, for cost and performance reasons, enterprises might find an all-in approach to public cloud may not be the way forward, according to several NetEvents panellists

• October 03, 2019 03 Oct'19

  Southern Water embarks on £15m datacentre modernisation programme

  Southern Water has enlisted the help of service provider MTI Technology to revamp its datacentres, with a greater emphasis on the use of software-defined processes and hyper-converged technologies

• September 30, 2019 30 Sep'19

  German police seize darkweb servers from datacentre housed in ex-NATO bunker

  Following a lengthy investigation, law enforcers in Germany have raided a datacentre in an ex-NATO bunker that is alleged to have been hosting illicit websites on the dark web

• September 30, 2019 30 Sep'19

  HPE refurbishes legacy IT assets to make money for users

  HPE Financial Services is giving old IT assets a new lease of life at its tech renewal site in Erskine, near Glasgow, as part of a promotion of the circular economy

• September 24, 2019 24 Sep'19

  Amsterdam new-build datacentre ban is not an ‘attack’ on operators, says government

  Dutch Data Center Association says a government official has offered written assurances that the temporary ban on new server farms in two areas of Amsterdam is just designed to spur adoption of sustainable growth habits

• September 20, 2019 20 Sep'19

  Drive for Nordic datacentre transformation

  Nordic enterprises looking to spread abroad are outsourcing datacentre IT in cutting-edge ways to gain international advantage

• September 20, 2019 20 Sep'19

  Google pairs ‘record-breaking’ green energy deal with European datacentre expansion commitment

  Google CEO Sundar Pichai publicly commits to expanding the company’s datacentre footprint in Europe and gives details of its largest-ever renewable energy purchase

• September 16, 2019 16 Sep'19

  DigiPlex to build two green datacentres near Oslo by the end of 2020

  Nordic datacentre operator Digiplex has set itself an ambitious target of bringing two new datacentres online near Oslo by the end of 2020

• September 12, 2019 12 Sep'19

  Digital Realty expands Docklands datacentre campus by opening Cloud House colocation facility

  Colocation giant expands datacentre campus in London’s Docklands and publishes research hinting at the economic benefits it could help to generate

• September 12, 2019 12 Sep'19

  Kao Data secures EMBL-EBI as tenant as bid to become leading life sciences colo gathers pace

  Essex-based wholesale datacentre operator Kao Data’s bid to become the colocation provider of choice for the life sciences community sees it secure the European Bioinformatics Institute as a client

• September 09, 2019 09 Sep'19

  Green energy developer earmarks Scotland for 'world's first' ocean-powered datacentre

  Plans are underway for a hyperscale-focused datacentre to be built in the north of Scotland, which its developers claim would be the first in the world to be powered by tidal energy