The team at i₃ Solutions discusses the balancing act between energy, site selection and price when building a more sustainable data centre.

Ed Ansett, Founder and Chairman of i₃ Solutions Group, asks could the Irish data centre sector explore energy sources such as natural gas, biogas and blended hydrogen for its power

In a world where sustainability is ever more prevalent, the continued use of diesel in data centres just won’t do. Customer demands, regulation and the outcry against GHG emissions may well make a switch from diesel standby to gas generation a timely move for those facilities still running on ‘dirty’ fuel, says Ed Ansett, founder and chairman at i₃ Solutions Group.

Sustainability is both a journey and a destination. For data centres to become truly sustainable there are many things that must change and some things that must end, says Ed Ansett, Founder and Chairman, isub>3 Solutions Group.

Customer demand, regulation and the outcry against GHG emissions may make a switch from diesel standby to gas generation a timely move for data centres

Customer demands, regulation and the outcry against GHG emissions may make a switch from diesel standby to gas generation a timely move for data centres, writes Ed Ansett, Founder and Chairman of i3 Solutions Group.

The project was completed in five months

The new series of white papers aims to provide vendor-neutral decision-making support together with insights into the factors associated with the many technology options currently available to the sector for lowering the carbon footprint of data centre operations.

Wherever generative AI is deployed, it will change the IT ecosystem within the data centre. From processing to memory, networking to storage, and systems architecture to systems management, no layer of the IT stack will remain unaffected.

With the importance of data centres and supporting digital infrastructure growing ever-increasingly important — and demands on them growing at a similar rate. Data Centre Magazine compiles a list of the top 10, and we make the list at number 9!

Two of Africa’s biggest economies suffer regular power grid blackouts. South Africa continues to grapple with a formidable energy challenge caused by a strained and unreliable power grid prone to rolling outages.

With green hydrogen widely touted as the most desirable option for achieving climate change goals, the debate is heating up in the data centre sector where proponents of hydrogen believe it could well be an ideal primary power source for putting the sector on a path to net zero.

With green credentials that include the UK’s lowest carbon energy intensity, increasing access to RERs, low-cost land and political backing, are the pieces in place for Scotland to fulfil its data centre sector potential?

Whether it is microgrids, distributed energy resources (DERs), co-gen, grid-interactive, islanded or integrated (decoupled or coupled) – there is growing consensus that data centres will require onsite or locally generated power delivered through microgrids.

To say microgrids will become a feature of future large data centre design, would be to overlook the idea that technically most data centres of scale can be configured to operate as local microgrids.

Here, Ed Ansett, Founder of i3 Solutions, discusses everything you need to know about microgrids. This conversation covers how data centres will require onsite, or locally generated power delivered through microgrids.