Committed to Net Zero data centres by 2030 DIGITAL REPORT 2021
IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
COMMIT TED TO NET -ZERO DATA CENTRES BY 2030
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Lex Coors, Chief Data Centre Technology and Development Officer discusses the company's commitment to its sustainability strategy
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s the interconnection hub for the world’s leading businesses, Interxion provides its clients with sustainable data centres and the right connectivity to interconnect, transact and grow businesses. The company has more than 700 connectivity providers in over 290 data centres across more than 24 countries. With its significant global footprint, Interxion’s clients can expand their reach geographically. This is because the company’s services provide clients with the proximity needed for latency-sensitive applications, and offers interconnection on a global scale. Founded in 1998, the company has changed massively over the years and has had to adapt to the changing technological landscape. Lex Coors, Interxion’s Chief Data Centre Technology and Development Officer and Visiting Professor at the University of East London, has been with the company since its infancy in 1999. Having witnessed first-hand the immense evolution of Interxion, Coors explained how it has changed over the years, he said: “Interxion started by working in minute trading. We then moved into data centres, where we collected as many carriers together with the internet exchanges, creating the first communities of interest with enterprise customers. Then when cloud technologies came, we incorporated those into our operations too.” 4
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Interxion ZUR3 data centre
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Emergency Power
Hybrid energy
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Service
When it matters most. In an increasingly connected world, where datacenters have become an integral part of society’s critical infrastructure, a stable, secure power supply is more important than ever. Zwart designs, builds and maintains emergency power installations for the world’s most demanding datacenter owners and operators. Together with it’s engine partner Mitsubishi, Zwart’s installations ensure a trusted back-up solution for our customers throughout Europe and Africa “When it Matters Most”. Over 90 years of experience are applied every day to ensure the highest standards in all aspects of project design, delivery and service. The Mitsubishi engines are recognised for their reliability and cost-effective operation and are ideally suited for mission critical applications. With over 100 gensets currently installed across multiple Interxion sites throughout Europe and Africa, Interxion can ensure that it delivers the highest levels of availability and uptime to its customers. As part of a shared commitment to delivering greener solutions, Mitsubishi and Zwart have recently announced that their datacenter emergency power installations can be operated with 100%HVO diesel,
a non-fossil fuel based alternative that reduces CO2 by up to 90%. Furthermore, Zwart and Mitsubishi are working closely with Professor Lex Coors from Interxion on his vision to the “Road to Zero”, an ambitious and challenging project to eliminate all emissions during non-emergency use by applying innovative maintenance and testing programs and developing custom equipment to ensure the high reliability reputation of Zwart’s solutions is maintained. Jim Craig, Managing Director of Zwart said, “Only by working together can we deliver on the ambitious targets for climate neutral datacenters in 2030” Lex Coors, Chief Datacenter Technology and Engineering Officer at Interxion, a Digital Realty Company stated “As a board member of the EU Climate Neutral Datacenter Pact I am committed to driving the Road to Zero and I am encouraged by the progress being made by Zwart and Mitsubishi in this respect”
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LEX COORS TITLE: CHIEF DATA CENTRE TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING OFFICER
Datasector over the last 10 years by Broadgroup
LOCATION: NETHERLANDS
( 2010 ), and again by DCD (2016) . Since 2019, Lex is working with the University
Over the past 25 years of his career, he
of East London to investigate the issues around
has built exceptionally strong credentials
sustainability for Datacentres and was recently
in the design of versatile, cost-effective and energy-efficient data centre infrastructure. During his time with Interxion he has pioneered
appointed as Visiting Professor. At the EUDCA Lex is the Chair for the EUDCA Policy Committee where he represents the
several new approaches to data centre design
interest of the European Commercial Data
and management, including the improvement
Centre Operator Community both politically and
of power ratio efficiency between server load
commercially. Further Lex is Board Member of the
and transformer load, and the industry’s first ever
European Climate neutral datacentre pact. Lex
modular approach to data centre architecture.
is member of the iMasons Advisory Council. He
Lex received already two times the Personal Judges Award for Outstanding Contribution to the
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EXECUTIVE BIO
December 2021
studied Mechanical Engineering and Management and Economics in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
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Committed to Net Zero data centres by 2030
Now Interxion can provide its customers with a hybrid cloud solution. These cloud technologies have also become increasingly significant with the emergence of the global remote workforce, who are more reliant on the cloud to access information remotely. The push towards these technologies is increasing as more companies utilise cloud software services to secure and back up their IT infrastructure. “We’ve changed significantly over the years. Now we embrace a lot of digital technologies to support our operations and have incorporated them into our platforms. We deal with medium-sized data and once we collect this data, the company and our algorithms can learn from that to help us optimise our operations. Technology has definitely changed the way we measure data, as the algorithms now do it for us,” Coors added. This evolution lends itself to Interxion’s commitment to its customers. The company
“ We have changed significantly over the years and now we embrace a lot of digital technologies to support our operations” LEX COORS
CHIEF DATA CENTER TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING OFFICER, INTERXION
has needed to adapt as its customers’ needs have changed, as Coors explained: “We have a lot of enterprise customers who require the efficiencies of the colocation services we offer. With the introduction of cloud technologies, we now work together with the large cloud players and some of their most critical applications are in our data centres. This is because we represent the core of all the networks coming together.” interxion.com
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WE BELIEVE THAT IT’S EVERYONE’S DUTY TO IMPROVE THE FUTURE OF OUR PLANET
This year, Mercury launched Our Planet, Our Duty, our plan for Responsible Business. Our Planet, Our Duty is our promise to help create a more sustainable environment around us. For more information please visit:
www.mercuryeng.com
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Interxion PAR8 data centre
“ We have been able to say that for a few years 100% of our data centres are running on sustainable energy” LEX COORS
CHIEF DATA CENTER TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING OFFICER, INTERXION
Adding to this, the Chief Data Centre Technology and Development Officer explained that as Interxion’s customers have grown and expanded, so has the number of data centres the company has to offer. Building sustainable data centres for the future The data centre provider is committed to its sustainability targets and in his role, Coors works to ensure that all of Interxion’s colocation services have a minimal impact on the environment. Explaining why sustainability is so important to the company, Coors said it is so important, he regards it “as a social corporate responsibility.”
To highlight how the company is supporting the global efforts to fight climate change, Coors outlined the work Interxion has been doing to reduce its carbon emission: “We started looking into our sustainability strategy over seven years ago. Initially, we started looking at energy efficiency in 2009 and even before that, we called it our energy overhead. Now, we have been able to say that for a few years, 100% of our data centres are running on sustainable energy.” Interxion has pioneered energy-saving designs within its data centres to ensure they run on sustainable energy. The company has harnessed everything from arctic winds, underground aquifers and even the Baltic Sea in order to reduce its carbon footprint. Working with big players in the technology scene has been crucial in supporting interxion.com
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Interxion Amsterdam Data Tower
700
connectivity providers in over
290
data centres across
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European countries
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Interxion, as it looked to add a sustainability focus to its operations. Coors explained that, despite Trump’s dismissal of sustainability initiatives in the United States, big customers such as Microsoft, AWS, Google and Facebook still maintained their commitment to their own sustainable targets. As a result, these big clients still expected Interxion to provide energy-efficient data centres. Interxion’s own sustainable ambitions Although Interxion is keen to support its clients’ sustainability targets by providing them with data centres run on renewable energy, the company is ambitious with its own targets. Outlining the company’s ambitions, Coors said: “Our corporate target
“We are passionate about sustainability because you cannot design a data centre well without this understanding” LEX COORS
CHIEF DATA CENTER TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING OFFICER, INTERXION
is a 68% reduction in scope one and reducing to two emissions by 2030. Scope one is the direct emissions, such as diesel usage; and scope two is the indirect emissions.” He continued: “I think that these targets are so ambitious because we have close to 300-plus data centres around the globe. We’re committed to this programme and we're driving year-on-year programmes to achieve this.” Supporting these ambitions is Interxion’s internal function, The Energy Strategy Group. This group has participants from interxion.com
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SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC
The transition to cleaner data centres We spoke with Schneider Electric’s SVP Secure Power Europe, Rob McKernan, to NAME SURNAME discuss JOB TITLE, how the company COMPANY NAME create a new era is helping of sustainable data centres ROB MCKERNAN, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, SECURE POWER EUROPE, SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC
AD
Can you tell me about Schneider Electric? Schneider Electric is the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation and the world’s most sustainable corporation in 2021 as ranked by Corporate Knights. As a business, we enable digital transformation across several key sectors including data centres, infrastructure, and industries. We do this by integrating world-leading processes, renewable energy, and highly efficient technologies with software and services, to drive sustainability throughout the lifecycle.
What is your role and responsibilities? As the SVP for Secure Power in Europe, my role is to empower our country leaders to support our customers within the data centre, industrial and critical IT spaces. This includes working with our customers to define their infrastructure strategy and the business outcomes they hope to achieve through
any accompanying sustainability or digital transformation initiative. From designing and specifying the technologies, to making them more efficient and reducing their carbon footprint, my role is to connect customers with our experts and empower them to transform their businesses sustainably.
Can you talk me through your company’s own sustainability initiatives? At Schneider Electric, we have many sustainability initiatives in place. They include the Schneider Electric Sustainability Impact (SSI) – in which we aim to help customers save 800M tonnes of carbon emissions by 2025. To-date we have helped reduce CO2 by 319 million tonnes, which is a great start. We are committed to reaching carbon neutrality across all company sites by 2025 and are aiming to achieve net-zero operational emissions by 2030. We also aim to achieve net zero emissions throughout our entire supply chain by 2050 and have committed to using no gases or SF6 by the end of 2025.
Why do you think it is important that data centres become more sustainable? Our industry has been working to reduce its energy consumption and lower carbon emissions for many years. One might argue that it is an exemplar to other industries. As large consumers of energy, it has a responsibility to commit towards sustainability and to reducing its environmental impact. New data centres can be designed to be resource efficient, however, it’s paramount that we don’t forget about inefficient legacy facilities. Here, Initiating modernisation or energy efficiency programs and switching to renewables are two key steps that legacy operators can take to become more sustainable.
How is your technology supporting this transition to more climate-conscious companies? I believe that from a technological perspective, achieving sustainability requires a combination of hardware, software, and digital services. However, it requires far more than just the technologies and any business hoping to reduce its environmental impact should carefully consider its strategy. At Schneider Electric we’re developing solutions to help operators meet demands for sustainability and resilience. Our Galaxy VL UPS is the industry’s most compact threephase solution, is powered by lithium-ion and offers up to 99% efficiency. We’re innovating in the design space, using prefabricated technologies to design resourceefficient facilities, and creating edge computing systems that can be deployed sustainably. Further, our vendor-agnostic EcoStruxure™ IT DCIM software helps end-users to not only measure their energy usage but monitor their mission-critical environments from anywhere to increase the reliability of their sites. Our DCIM software delivers smart analytics with predictive capabilities alongside built-in cybersecurity analysis, physical and environmental security monitoring – a complete solution for today’s operators. Finally, we’ve created an Energy and Sustainability services bureau, helping customers extend the lifecycle of their infrastructure and reduce their carbon
impact. We also have a business that’s dedicated to helping customers procure renewable energy.
How do new and emerging technologies support this transition to cleaner data centres? Technologies have a key role to play in future data centres, which must be adaptive, resilient, sustainable, and efficient. However, technology is just one aspect, and a more holistic approach to design and operations is needed. At Schneider Electric, we believe the sector can address this through five steps. First, operators must adopt sustainable practices from the outset, creating global climate strategies that are transparent and measurable. Secondly, they must maximise the use of renewables to decrease their carbon footprint. Thirdly, by establishing resource efficient designs, operators can take a more repeatable approach to deployment and drive efficiency. Fourthly, reducing CO2 within the supply chain is crucial, and partnering with businesses that are aligned with the same ambitions can play a key role in addressing scope 3 emissions. Finally, the utilization of circular materials that can be recycled is essential to reduce landfill.
What can we expect from Schneider Electric in the future? One area we’re particularly excited about is the development of new sustainability metrics specifically for data centre operators. For many years PUE has been a great measure of efficiency, however, the landscape is changing, and as our industry works towards net zero, it’s essential that sustainability metrics evolve to reflect this ambition. Our mission is to be our customers’ partner for efficiency and sustainability, so we’ll continue our work to build the sustainable and resilient data centres of the future, and help the industry reduce its carbon impact.
Discover more about EcoStruxure™ IT”
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Full insights into your data center, edge or colo infrastructure with DCIM. EcoStruxure™ IT Advisor A vendor-neutral planning, modeling and optimization tool.
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senior management and is dedicated to developing, implementing and governing the overall energy strategies; including: • Intelligent energy buying • Continually improving Interxion’s energy efficiency and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) • Establishing the value of energy as a core service to its customers. Collaborating with strategic partners To ensure the success of reducing its ‘scope one’ emissions, Interxion looks to its partners to help provide sustainable products and services to improve its operations. With Mitsubishi, Interxion is looking at different ways to reduce the amount of diesel the company uses in its day-to-day operations. As a significant polluter, Interxion is keen to reduce its diesel use and as a result, reduce its scope one emissions. The company continues 16
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“ Technology has definitely changed the way we measure data, as the algorithms now do it for us” LEX COORS
CHIEF DATA CENTER TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING OFFICER, INTERXION
to work hard on this with Mitsubishi and its other partners, Schneider and Mercury. Understanding the importance of partner collaboration is crucial to ensuring the success of Interxion’s sustainable ambitions, as Coors explained: “It’s key that our partners’ sustainability targets align with our own. We have also realised that our partners can’t support our sustainability targets all by themselves, so they need the operators of the data centre to explain the issue we're trying to solve.”
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“Our partners listen to what the problem is and then we talk about it, to see if there's a common interest, before we start working on the solution,” he added. Interxion’s alignment with the European Commission Keen to support the global efforts against climate change, Interxion also works closely with other data centre providers and cloud providers within the Climate-Neutral Data Centre Pact. This collaborative effort between these providers came after the European Commission announced that data centres should be climate neutral by 2030.
This Pact was set up as Interxion was keen that players in the data centre industry would meet these collective goals, ensuring the targets would be drafted by those with knowledge of the industry itself. Coors himself is on the board of directors with five other key players in the European data centre industry. Expanding on the aims of the association, Coors said: “We spoke about how to become a more sustainable industry and realised we’re all already on the road to reaching these targets set by the European Commission. We formed the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact and defined
INTERXION MEETS THE DEMANDS OF THE DIGITAL ECONOMY WITH TAILORED SOLUTIONS FROM SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC Today’s data centres are fast evolving; they have become the very beating heart of the digital economy. These mission-critical environments are far more than the legacy data storage and processing facilities of the past. They are gateways to emerging new markets and digital platforms from which businesses can expand their reach to connect with every aspect of our digital lives. Such evolutions require a combination of energy efficient technologies that support demands for both sustainability and resilience, and secure IT platforms capable of supporting an incredible amount of real time data. To meet the needs of its customers, Interxion, a Digital Realty company, has continued to respond with greater connectivity, more redundancy and power, while continuing to align with today’s environmental and security standards. As Fabrice Coquio, president of Interxion France, notes, “Data centres are the first brick upon which we build the digital economy,” and for nearly two decades Interxion
has been laying those bricks one by one, now operating more than 100 state of the art facilities across Europe, with a commitment to offering customers a complete portfolio of flexible data centre solutions. For more than 15 years, Interxion has enjoyed a long-standing and successful partnership with Schneider Electric to deliver innovative colocation solutions. Schneider Electric has supported Interxion throughout the design, construction, and operational stages of its high-density data centre environments; providing flexible architectures that include energy efficient cooling solutions, resilient power protection systems such as its Galaxy UPS, PDU and switchgear, and EcoStruxure™ IT management software to deliver uptime, sustainability and efficiency for its customers, while keeping the environment in mind. LEARN MORE IN OUR CASE STUDY, HERE.
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five pillars to achieve carbon neutrality.” “The first pillar is clean energy. So by 2025, 75% of all data centres shall be running on clean energy and by 2030, 100% of them will be. Then we need to look at energy efficiency to make sure the data centres are efficient, this is pillar number two. The third pillar looks into reusing energy. We also have the circular economy as the fourth pillar and finally, we look at water usage. These five pillars form the base of the association,” he outlined. Approved by the European Commission’s Executive Vice President Frans Timmerman, the association sets up its own regulatory framework and is run without external legislation. Embraced by Interxion, the 18
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association is a collaborative space that sets ambitious but achievable sustainable goals for data centre providers. Including most of the continent's key players, the current signatories of the pact represent 90% of the industry in Europe. Just this year, the pact presented its first policy paper to the European Commission following its request. The policy paper includes a comprehensive set of 19 recommendations. These recommendations cover public procurement regulations from the procurement and development of renewable energies that can be used by the cloud and data centre industry, to supporting the development of circular
water and energy management, and recycling in the ICT sector. A signatory himself, Timmerman commented on the pact the day it was created, he said: “Citizens across Europe are using ever more technology to go about their daily lives and they want this technology to help secure a sustainable future for all. Today’s pledge – from important parts of the data industry – constitutes a promise to society and offers a welcome first step towards achieving our common ambitions for a smart and sustainable future.” Signatories of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact have agreed to implement measurable energy efficiency targets,
purchase 100% carbon-free energy, prioritise water conservation, reuse and repair servers, and look for ways to recycle heat. This pledge is particularly significant when considering findings from the International Energy Agency. It found that data centres consume approximately 200 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, or nearly 1% of global electricity demand, contributing to 0.3% of all global CO2 emissions. Both Interxion and Coors, along with the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, recognise the importance of transforming the industry to reduce the damaging effects it can have on the climate. Expanding on this, Coors said: “We are passionate about sustainability because you cannot design a data centre well without this understanding. If you do not understand sustainability well, you can build a data centre, but it will not meet the targets for the future. That's why this is so important for us.”
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