During an impressive gala evening diner, attended by the top of the broad Dutch IT sector, Switch Datacenters, the leading sustainable datacenter operator and developer from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, has received the prestigious Computable Award 2021 in the category of ‘Sustainability & Corporate Social Responsibility’ (MVO / CSR).
Computable Award 2021 ‘Sustainability & corporate social responsibility’
Switch Datacenters competed in the race for this prestigious award with fierce competition from well known brands like Amazon and Lenovo, as well as many other innovative IT companies. All companies in this category had impressive, innovative and effective solutions to save CO2 emissions and/or energy usage.
The reason why Switch Datacenters received the sustainability & corporate social responsibility award was that Switch Datacenters is the first commercial datacenter operator and developer in in the world who actively offers its customers a financial incentive in the form of a discount on the power bill in return for receiving high temperature residual server heat from its colocation customers.
Smarter usage of power and cooling in datacenters
By offering both a financial incentive and technical support, Switch Datacenters is actively supporting and helping its colocation customers to contribute to a smarter usage of power and cooling in datacenters. By promoting new server cooling technologies like DLC (direct liquid cooling) and immersed cooling in its datacenters, Switch Datacenters can better help customers to save CO2 emissions and improve its CSR position of the IT departments.
“Switch Datacenters welcomes companies who want to cool their IT servers in a modern, non conventional, reliable and secure way.” says Edgar van Essen, Managing Director of Switch Datacenters. “Currently there are several new cooling technologies already in use in niches like HPC (high performance computing) and gaming world, that can easily be implemented in regular IT environments as well. By cooling servers directly at the chip, at least 80% of the heat generated by the chip can be gathered and transported through a liquid transport system, and can be reused due to its high temperatures directly for heating buildings and municipal heating networks. Alternative technologies with even better heat recapture ratios (known as immersion cooling) are also gaining traction today.”
Awareness for new technology
Currently many regular IT companies are either not aware of the new cooling technology developments in datacenters, are too conservative in their new server equipment choices or face many datacenter operators who are not keen to adapt their current air cooling systems to new technologies. Switch Datacenters, on the other hand is actively promoting and targeting CIO’s and IT managers to be more aware of the choices they have and the impact on CO2 when ordering new server hardware and searching datacenter colocation space.
“‘We believe customers will only change to new technologies when they understand both the technical, operational and financial gains of switching to modern cooling technologies on their servers.” says Edgar van Essen “That is why we want to change the discussion from a technical discussion only to a business and strategic CSR discussion, by also offering a financial incentive to the customer, giving them an extra business argument to manage their IT departments more actively on CO2 impact. “
