Business Enquirer Issue 108 | AtNorth | Nov'22

Processing Digital Sustainability AtNorth

Processing Digital Sustainability

Accordingto Science Focus, sending 65 emails is the equivalent of driving one kilometre in a car. In the UK, if each email user sent one less email a day, the country could reduce its carbon emissions by 16,433 tonnes of CO2.

With that staggering data, it’s vital that businesses pay attention to its digital carbon footprint.

When it comes to sustainability, Iceland is an undisputed world leader. Currently, 90% of Iceland’s primary energy needs are met with sustainable energy (as of September 2021).

The Icelandic government has goals to reach carbon neutrality by 2040, and to be fossil fuel free by 2050.

It is no surprise, then, that one of the World’s most sustainable data centre organisations, atNorth, is headquartered in Iceland.

Nordic expansion

Established in 2009, atNorth is a leading PanNordic data centre services company.

The business, which currently has two sites in Iceland and one in Sweden, offers environmentally responsible, power-efficient and cost-optimised data centre hosting facilities and high-performance computing services.

“We’re currently experiencing a growth phase and will be looking to open further centres in the coming years,” shared atNorth’s CEO, Eyjólfur Magnús Kristinsson, “our goal is

to have data centres in all Nordic countries by 2025”.

The organisation is currently constructing its third Icelandic base (and fourth Nordic data centre), due to open in 2023. Meanwhile, the existing data centres are also expanding.

The business is currently looking to secure at least 50 megawatts of power capacity and land to build another hyperscale colocation data centre.

Its aim is to serve the strong demand from both hyperscale and HPC customers that now look towards the Nordics to increase efficiency and sustainability of their workloads.

The planned new data centre will use 100% renewable energy, making it one of the most sustainable and cost-efficient wholesale data centres ever built.

On leadership

Mr Kristinsson has been leading atNorth since its inception as a standalone business in 2018.

“As a leader, I think it’s crucial to trust your colleagues, be a good listener and have transparent dialogues,” he said, “I think I should attend the office every day as the best version of myself, so I can have a positive impact,”.

Mr Kristinsson’s opinions on leadership are shared throughout the business, which has a strong culture and a transparent management

Laura WatlingMalvern Kandemwa

AtNorth

E. Magnús Kristinsson CEO, atNorth

AtNorth

SWE01Heat Recovery and Cooling System - Sweden

team. “Our culture of transparency is reflected even down to the layout of our workspace, with all open space and no closed doors,” he shared.

What goes around, comes around

By leveraging innovative data centre design, power efficiency and intelligent cluster operations, atNorth considers itself the data centre company of choice. It can enable businesses to reduce overall TCO, increase efficiency, and secure the future of longerterm infrastructure deployments.

“Our mission is to decarbonise IT platforms, with a vision to offer more compute for a better world,” said Mr Kristinsson.

atNorth is proudly driven by sustainability. Only using hydropower and geothermal from Iceland’s grid, customers can rest assured that atNorth’s centres in Iceland are powered purely by renewable energy. Similarly, Sweden’s energy is driven by green.

“We have also made developments to optimise our machine cooling process. Our equipment uses less speed and less moving parts, which

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atNorth’s ICE02 DC colocation data center

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lowers its carbon footprint, with no effect on our output,” explained Mr Kristinsson.

Air temperatures range from 0 °C to 13.3 °C, creating perfect conditions to enable significant reductions in the amount of electricity used to keep the data centre servers cool.

To meet its goals within the circular economy, atNorth has partnered with Swedish energy provider, Stockholm Exergi, for the construction of a new data centre in Stockholm.

The aim for the data centre will be to harness the waste heat generated by the computing equipment. The heat generated will be redistributed to heat local homes in the capital.

Sustainable computing in action

Recently, atNorth worked in partnership with Dell Technologies to provide BNP Paribas with a state-of-the-art infrastructure as a service solution.

As part of BNP Paribas exponential and responsible infrastructure growth, the business moved 30% of its data centre requirements to atNorth’s facilities in Iceland. By doing so, it has future-proofed BNP’s HPC infrastructure.

The infrastructure, which includes Dell’s PowerEdge servers, utilises atNorth’s ultrapower-efficient data centre, run purely from renewable energy.

The move has enabled BNP Paribas to:

• Reduce energy usage by 50%;

• Decrease CO2 output by 85%;

• Transition to 100% renewable energy;

• Increase power efficiency at higher compute density;

• Lower TCO;

• And adopt future-proof, environmentally responsible HPC.

“Although this is a fantastic example of what our service can do, this case study is

not unique for us. We are fulfilling this for our customers time and time again,” said Mr Kristinsson.

Focussing on HPC and AI

atNorth’s primary focus is on its HPC (High Performance Computing) and AI services, an area in which Mr Kristinsson foresees considerable opportunity.

In this arena, the business’s solutions range from performance optimised and secure bare metal clusters that are ready to be deployed, to tailor made clusters designed to meet its customer’s specific requirements.

“Our centres are purpose built to hold the highdensity racks required, which have a variety of redundancy levels,” shared Mr Kristinsson,

AtNorth

“we have a dedicated, in-house HPC and AI engineering team to manage the customer’s cluster, constantly collaborating and finetuning to ensure optimal performance”.

This allows customers to focus on its HPC and AI results, rather than worry about capacity requirements.

“Technology is moving more to HPC and AI, and so our strategy is underpinned by this focus,” said Mr Kristinsson.

atNorth: the trusted partner

Like most businesses, atNorth has faced its challenges by an amalgamation of global events causing supply chain disruption.

“We are receiving new technology every day

and want to reassure customers that we can stay equipped whilst keeping the costs stable. It’s a challenge, but we need to overcome this to become the trusted partner for businesses' most valuable asset,” shared Mr Kristinsson.

Mr Kristinsson expects both the industry and atNorth to see significant growth in the next five years.

“Cloud technology is growing and developing at an extreme rate and will continue to do,” he shared, “we also see the challenges and opportunities of hybrid workloads and specific data such as data sovereignty”.

To meet the demands, atNorth are continuing to scale up, by scouting for both the centres and the people of the future.

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atNorth’s ICE02 DC colocation data center

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