Dublin Data Centre investment continues to grow

by | Apr 2, 2012 | Articles, Markets

Microsoft announced that it is investing an additional US$130 million to expand its data centre located in Dublin, Ireland. The expansion is driven by increased demand for Microsoft’s cloud services. This investment builds on the original $500m investment Microsoft made in the Dublin data centre, which has been operational since July 2009, serving customers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).During a visit to Dublin, Peter Klein, Chief Financial Officer, Microsoft Corporation said “This investment shows where we are placing our bets for the future. As customers embrace Microsoft cloud services such as Office 365, Windows Live, Xbox Live, Bing and the Windows Azure platform, we are investing in regional cloud infrastructure to meet their needs.”

Collocation and managed hosting provider Telecity is also investing in Dublin with the expansion of its facility at North West Business Park. This follows its take-over of rival Data Electronics last year, giving it a total of three data centres in the city. Other collocation providers in Dublin include Interexion and Hosting365.

At the other end of the scale, data centre specialist Future-tech has just completed the construction of a high density super-efficient data centre for Trinity College. The facility, which delivers up to 20kW per cab, has a design PUE of 1.2.During commissioning in February 2012 the PUE was measured at 1.19 with an IT load of just 25% of full capacity. Data centre consultant James Wilman points out: “achieving good PUE figures at full load should be a given on any new data centre, getting those results at part load is much more difficult. Although we do not yet have the annualised PUE, the results measured so far are in line with our predictions and we expect that once we have a full year’s figures we will be showing an annualised PUE of 1.18 or even better”.

All this follows hard on the heels of Google’s announcement in September 2011 that it is to invest $75m (£65m) in a new 11-acre data centre in Dublin, creating 230 jobs. This will be its second Dublin data centre.

The search giant is a champion of energy efficiency and says that Ireland’s naturally cool climate contributed to its decision, as this increases the amount of free cooling available when compared to most other potential EU locations.

If you would like to discuss how you might be able to improve the efficiency of you data centre, or any other aspect of data centre infrastructure, please call Richard Stacey on 0845 9000 127 or contact us.