Telehouse Opens Flagship Green Data Centre In London

Data centre provider Telehouse today opened its flagship green data centre, Telehouse West, located in London’s Docklands. The £80 million facility will offer connectivity to more than 400 ISPs, carriers, operators and Internet Exchanges. Telehouse also announced its first customer: Hitachi has built a high-density data centre in the building, to fill with its own modular green equipment.

Telehouse West is built over nine storeys and offers organisations a total of 19,000m² of floor space. “In a recent survey of UK decision makers from some of the country’s top organisations, 89 percent stated they were keen to secure additional data centre space,” said Michelle Reid, sales and marketing director at Telehouse in a statement. “This trend is supported by many analysts who have stated that a lack of capacity in the capital is costing the UK economy millions.”

According to Telehouse, maximum redundancy and reliability levels are ensured by having four redundant HV power systems on separate grids. In the future, Telehouse West will also house a 132K primary sub-station to provide greater redundancy protection.

Helping companies meet CRC

Telehouse claims that, as well as providing secure, resilient data centre services, the facility will help UK businesses achieve their green commitments to the forthcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) legislation. When eWEEK Europe visited the site in December, the company said the sub-station would be powered using a combination of fuels, including at least 10 percent renewables. Already the site features solar panels on the roof, which will provide 6,000kWh of power per year.

The decision to use renewable energy sources was partly driven by pressure from the Greater London Authority (GLA), London Thames Gateway Development Corporation and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets to implement a sustainable energy strategy. London Borough of Tower Hamlets, for example, requires that all major developments over 1000m² incorporate renewable power generation.

However, Telehouse’s technical services director Bob Harris explained that what really “swung the pendulum” for the planners was the company’s strategy to use 9MW of low-grade waste heat to power buildings in the surrounding area. The company claims that this will save the community 1,107 tonnes of CO2 per year.

Telehouse has therefore built a network of pipes which will transport water, warmed by the excess heat from the racks of servers, to more than 1,000 homes in the area free of charge. The data centre also benefits from this, as the water returning from the developments provides free cooling, reducing the company’s expenses.

“We designed Telehouse West with the forthcoming CRC legislation in mind,” explained Reid. “The opening of the facility will not only help customers achieve their own green targets by reducing the amount of carbon allowances they will need to purchase, but also enable them to expand their businesses and launch new services as they see fit.”

Green data centres coming into fashion

Telehouse West is Telehouse’s 35th data centre worldwide. In recent years the organisation has expanded its operations into emerging markets, most recently announcing plans to open a new data centre in Johannesburg, South Africa ahead of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The company hopes the move will enable it to establish a firm foothold in Africa and build further partnerships within the region.

Data centre companies worldwide are increasingly looking for renewable and sustainable sources of power and cooling to generate both energy and cost savings. ISP and hosting company Other World Computing (OWC) recently became the first US data centre operator to run its operation entirely on wind power. The 131-foot on-site wind turbine was erected on 19 October 2009, and has since been providing all the electrical power for its facility in Woodstock, Illinois.

Also in 2009, Telehouse rival TeleCityGroup opened a data centre in Stockholm, Sweden, least year, which uses power generated by wind and hydropower and “free air” cooling to regulate temperatures for 4 months of the year. Meanwhile, the the world’s first sea water air conditioned (SWAC) data centre opened in Mauritius, drawing cold sea water from nearly 2000 metres down to cool its heat exchanges.

The Hitachi data centre within Telehouse West will use “small footprint” remotely managed technology. Hitachi and Telehouse have been developing modular data centre equipment since 2007, and it was launched in Japan in 2009.