Microsoft, TelecityGroup Win Design Honors

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An aerial view of the Microsoft data center in Dublin showing the rooftop air handler units atop the first phased of the facility, as well as the vacant roof space available for additional air handlers as the remainder of the facility is built out.

Microsoft, TeleCityGroup and LAMDA Hellix Data Centers were among the companies cited for their innovation at the 6th Data Centres Europe Awards event held June 24 in Sophia Antipolis, France. The awards were part of the annual data center conference sponsored by BroadGroup.

Microsoft's Dublin facility was honored as Best Enterprise Data Centre Facility. The 550,000 square foot facility  has no chillers, using outside air to cool the thousands of servers powering the company’s “Live” suite of online services for users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Microsoft also said it can run its server rooms at temperatures of up to 95 degrees F (35 degrees Celsius), much warmer than most data centers, which typically range between 68 and 72 degrees.

Waste Heat Reuse
TelecityGroup was recognized for Best European Colocation Facility for its new Condorcet data centre in Paris. The Condorcet data center is Telecity’s third facility in Paris, and waste energy from the facility will be used to heat a “Climate Change Arboretum” built on-site, which will recreate the climatic conditions expected to prevail in France in 2050.

LAMDA Hellix, which is based in Greece, was recognized with the Best European Green Initiative award presented by The Green Grid. Apostolos Kakkos, Founder & CEO of LAMDA Hellix, said that the fact that the honor went to a company "located in a small EE country of high environmental temperatures is a fact that makes us feel happy and proud, especially during the period of recession our country is up against." Kakkos said the award "proves the know-how we have established in Greece that can be exported all around the world.”

The following awards were also announced:

In addition, the Judges made three special awards:

CTO Award for Innovation in Data Centres: This award recognizes the growing challenge to corporations in managing their strategic assets with best-in-class telemetry and tooling. The award was presented to Joe Polastre, the CTO of Sentilla Corporation, due to the contribution the company's product offering has made in this complex space.

Judges Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Data Centre Sector: The judges awarded this to Lex Coors, Vice President Data Center Technology & Engineering Group, Interxion who the judges praised for his rare combination of skills which have brought international benefits to the data centre industry. His immense insight and approach has influenced the data centre design philosophy of his own company in its data centre operations across 26 locations in 11 countries. He has been closely involved in assessing the impending Carbon Reduction Committee legislation and has made a significant contribution to sustainable development, and shown his tenacity on PUE development.

The Special Award for Outstanding Contribution to Innovation and Education in the Data Centre Sector was given to APC by Schneider Electric. Its innovation in the sector, embraces an array of initiatives across its entire portfolio ranging from solutions that fully integrate power, cooling, management software and environmental management within a rack-optimized design, to offering a flexibility to deploy systems that meet the current data centre needs of customers.