DESIGNING FOR THE FUTURE, TODAY DIGITAL REPORT 2021
GREEN
POWER IN THE
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June 2021
SPACE DC
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THE EXECUTIVE TEAM BEHIND SPACEDC TALKS GREEN POWER, EMERGING MARKETS, AND COLLABORATING WITH THE OCP
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cross Southeast Asia (SEA), the region’s data centre industry is experiencing a period of generational change. In Singapore, the region’s most mature market, construction of new data centres has ground to a halt, stopped short by a government moratorium that took effect back in 2019 - part of the government’s attempts to find a way to reconcile a powerhungry business with its own commitments to the Paris Climate Agreement. Elsewhere, the rise of e-commerce and cloud, combined with the effects of the ongoing COVID19 pandemic, is driving demand for digital infrastructure to all-time highs. “In 2019, SEA’s digital economy was worth about $100bn. That figure is showing every sign of tripling by 2025,” says Darren Hawkins, CEO of SpaceDC. SpaceDC’s COO, Carolyn Harrington, explains that, “Traditionally, companies would look to house their data and compute resources in Singaporean data centres. But Singapore has a moratorium going on right now as the country grapples with how to reconcile its data centre industry with its carbon-neutrality goals.” The trend emerging in response, she continues, is that companies across SEA are now gravitating towards data centres within emerging markets like Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, as opposed to Singapore. This is where SpaceDC comes in. Founded in 2019, the Singapore-based startup is bringing new levels of technical sophistication, and a focus on green power, to emerging markets
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“ OUR MISSION IS TO BE A ONE-STOPSHOP FOR CUSTOMERS LOOKING TO EXPAND IN BOTH MATURE AND EMERGING MARKETS” DARREN HAWKINS TITLE: CEO COMPANY: SPACEDC INDUSTRY: DATA CENTRES LOCATION: SINGAPORE Darren Hawkins is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of SpaceDC, the first data center provider in Singapore to establish a partnership with the government's sovereign wealth fund (GIC). Over the course of a 30+ year career in the data centre and critical infrastructure industries, Hawkins has worked for clients such as ANZ, Global Switch, Toyota, HSBC, BAA, TfL and Telstra. He has a proven reputation for delivering a broad range of capital-intensive projects that led to long-term business advantages across Europe and Asia Pacific, with successful projects ranging in value of up to $10bn.
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SpaceDC Chief Executive Officer Darren Hawkins
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State of the Art Data Centres with resilient and high-quality infrastructure | Space DC
“GREEN POWER IS GOING TO BE IMMENSELY IMPORTANT OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS”
throughout SEA. The - well underway, we company opened its sat down with Hawkins, first data centre in the Harrington, and SpaceDC’s Indonesian capital of CTO Nick Stavroulakis, Jakarta in November of to discuss the changing last year. Housed in an landscape of SEA’s elegant, yet industrial, data centre industry, silver building 15 the legacy of COVIDkilometres from the heart 19, and the realities of of the city, JAK2 delivers delivering green data 1.45 MW of carrier neutral centre infrastructure in data centre capacity in a the tropics. DARREN HAWKINS Tier III facility that not only CEO, delivers a PUE of 1.3 in a Staying cool and keeping SPACEDC country where average it green in the tropics temperatures never fall below 25 Degrees “Climate is a huge factor to consider Celsius, but also holds the title of Asia’s first when expanding into both developing OCP-Ready data centre. and mature markets in SEA. Jakarta DC Now, with Space ’s next project, JAK1 - a 24 and Singapore are both very hot and MW hyperscale facility that both dramatically humid climates year-round, as opposed expands the company’s capacity in Indonesia, to Melbourne or Sydney, or markets and maintains the exacting standards that further north where you get seasons,” make JAK2 stand out from the competition explains Stavroulakis, the man in charge 8
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of designing and building a portfolio of data centres that are not only capable of delivering world-class colocation services in the heart of Jakarta, but doing it sustainably. “Success in SEA is really dependent on building to a design that maximises your facility's efficiency in this hot and humid climate.” As a result, SpaceDC’s Jakarta data centres - which are both housed on its 1.8 hectare ID01 campus - take a novel approach to cooling their server racks. “Rather than use a very traditional chilled water solution, or even a DX CRAC unit design, we're using high-efficiency, variable-speed chillers, which bring our efficiency right up and our PUE right down,” Stavroulakis explains. “With the design of JAK2, we spent a lot of time designing and building to both international and Indonesian standards to make sure that the
facility meets the needs and expectations of both overseas and domestic customers.” JAK2 uses fan walls to cool its server racks which, as opposed to a traditional CRAC unit, is far more efficient. Stavroulakis adds that, from a design and maintenance perspective, “Fan walls also mean that there's no raised floor, which means we can install bigger, heavier, denser racks. The other advantage there is that the fan walls can all be maintained by the onsite staff, as opposed to having to call in a more specialised contractor to come and repair a broken CRAC unit.” Keeping both temperatures and PUE’s low in a climate like Jakarta is no mean feat, but for SpaceDC, it’s a nonnegotiable issue. As Harrington explains, “Sustainability really is at the heart of our philosophy, starting from the design phase of the data centre.”
JAK1: BRINGING HYPERSCALE TO INDONESIA
CASE STUDY...
“Indonesia’s data centre sector is expected to grow significantly, driven largely by mass e-commerce adoption. Currently, there is more than 100 MW of hyperscale capacity that's expected to be added to the market over the next few years,” Hawkins says. “And we'll be developing 25 MW of that ourselves in our ID01 campus.” The overwhelming share of that capacity will be housed in JAK1, SpaceDC’s 24 MW hyperscale data centre. Built to exacting Tier III, OCP-Ready, Colo Solution Provider Status standards, JAK1 promises to be one of the most cutting-edge, efficient and green data centres, both in Indonesia and all of SEA.
JAK1 at a glance: Capacity: 24 MW Uptime Institute Tier III certification N+1 redundancy on all critical power and cooling systems 99.995% availability 24 x 1,000kW data halls Floorspace: 26,000m2
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SpaceDC Chief Technology Officer Nick Stavroulakis
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“SUCCESS IN SEA IS REALLY DEPENDENT ON BUILDING TO A DESIGN THAT MAXIMISES YOUR FACILITY'S EFFICIENCY IN THIS HOT AND HUMID CLIMATE”
NICK STAVROULAKIS TITLE: CTO COMPANY: SPACEDC INDUSTRY: DATA CENTRES LOCATION: SINGAPORE As the Chief Technology Officer at SpaceDC, Nick Stavroulakis oversees the design and construction of all the company’s data centre campuses. Prior to joining SpaceDC, Stavroulakis served as the Principal and Project Engineer at Wood & Grieve Engineers, spearheading multidisciplinary teams of more than 25 technical staff with major projects exceeding AUD500mn in value. Some of the clients and projects include ANZ Bank, Global Switch, Telstra and Fujitsu Data Centers. He currently lives in Singapore with his family. He has a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering and holds a certificate by Uptime Institute as an Accredited Tier Designer.
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2019
SpaceDC was founded in 2019
50+
The company currently has 50+ employees
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Going green in SEA, however, can be an uphill struggle. “Jakarta still uses mostly coal-fired power stations,” says Stavroulakis. “Which is why we've also got several options for doing onsite gas power generation, which is good compared to buying exclusively from the grid. Natural gas is a very good transition fuel in countries like Indonesia where there aren't enough renewables to go around.” JAK2 was the first data centre in Indonesia to fit a Selective Catalytic Reduction system to the diesel generators used to power its UPS, ensuring that maintaining its rate of 99.982% uptime availability doesn’t come at the cost of its green ambitions. SpaceDC is also actively exploring more on-demand renewable energy generation for the customers for whom green power is a must-have. “If we have the demand from the customer, we'll develop our own solar array to fuel their presence in our facility,” says Hawkins. “We've been working away in the background developing those options, and we're ready to start having those conversations with our customers. It's a good interim step that allows us to offer a far more environmentally friendly and efficient alternative to grid supply.” In the meantime, Stavroulakis and his team are exhibiting a laser-like focus on reducing the power that SpaceDC’s facilities consume. In a market where renewables are in short supply, “It's better to reduce the amount of energy we use in the first place than to try and buy just solar power in a market where it isn't widely available.” Harrington, whose job as COO is very much the Yin to Stavroulakis’ Yang, is quick to add that “Sustainability is at the heart of our business, and we instil it in everything we do - not just how we run our data centres.” Spacedc.com
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SpaceDC Site Tour
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groundbreaking in many ways, its 1.45 MWs pale in comparison to the next phase of SpaceDC’s Indonesian expansion. “JAK1 takes us to a new level in terms of being able to provide better performance and technical specifications to our customers,” enthuses Hawkins, adding that, “We've spent a lot of time during the building of JAK2 using the lessons we learned along the way to improve JAK1.” The four-storey facility can accommodate taller racks, and even denser server deployment of up to 10 kilowatts per rack, and promises to deliver some of the greenest, most efficientlyused power of any data centre in the region. To do that, JAK1’s design is breaking with a lot of the accepted practices in the Indonesian data centre market. “There's a lot of accepted redundancy in the design of some of the data centres in the Indonesian market,” explains Hawkins, “which is obviously inefficient, from a product, design, and environmental perspective.” SpaceDC, Hawkins adds, is looking to educate its customers about the From cutting down on paper usage in the office, using as little power as possible, and making sure that the power that is used is the greenest power possible, to reusing building materials. “When we built JAK2, we didn't throw anything away; all waste materials were reused in the construction process,” she adds. JAK1: Taking it to the next level “As a design objective, what we wanted to do with JAK2 was provide a robust and resilient data centre built to international standards that matched the quality of facility you might see in Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney and other tier one markets,” says Hawkins. JAK2 has been up and running for just under six months now and, while
“JAK1 TAKES US TO A NEW LEVEL IN TERMS OF BEING ABLE TO PROVIDE BETTER PERFORMANCE AND TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS TO OUR CUSTOMERS” DARREN HAWKINS CEO, SPACEDC
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Meet the SpaceDC team
“ SUSTAINABILITY IS AT THE HEART OF OUR BUSINESS, AND WE INSTIL IT IN EVERYTHING WE DO - NOT JUST HOW WE RUN OUR DATA CENTRES” CAROLYN HARRINGTON COO, SPACEDC
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fact that, because JAK1 (and JAK2) facilities are built to next generation standards of quality, they don't need the same amount of built-in resilience that more traditional facilities require. “The average PUE for a data centre in Jakarta is close to 2, and the Uptime Industry calculates the global average at around 1.58,” says Stavroulakis. “We have a PUE of 1.3 which, if you look at a cold climate, isn't that impressive. But if you look at the kinds of PUE being recorded in tropical climates like ours, it's quite good.” JAK1 was originally going to spin up in 2021, but the pressures of COVID-19 have conspired to push the launch date to early next year - still an impressive feat given the
DC SPACE SpaceDC Chief
Operating Officer Carolyn Harrington
CAROLYN HARRINGTON TITLE: COO COMPANY: SPACEDC INDUSTRY: DATA CENTRES
hammer blow that the pandemic delivered to the delicate Swiss watch of the global just-in-time manufacturing industry. “I think the world of manufacturing has spent the last 20 years or so really refining that 'just in time' model, where you have the minimum amount of inventory possible, parts from one factory get finished and then shipped straight out to another factory for the next step, and so on,” says Stavroulakis. “It was a really big eye opener to see how COVID19 threw that whole model out the window more or less overnight.” Over the past 12 months, SpaceDC has worked closely with its manufacturing partners and suppliers to overcome the challenges of the pandemic. “Everyone’s thinking three, four, five steps
EXECUTIVE BIO
LOCATION: SINGAPORE Carolyn Harrington is the Chief Operating Officer of SpaceDC, a role in which she oversees not only the overall operations of the company’s data centre assets, but also the business’ commercial arm, including sales, customer account management, legal, and marketing. She brings more than two decades of experience establishing and growing new companies to the role, and excels at strategic planning, as well as effective management of staff and development of market ready products and services. Harrington has received widespread recognition by various establishments, including Springboard Enterprises and, more recently, Portfolio Magazine Singapore, as an accomplished women entrepreneur leading technologydriven companies.
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“ IN ORDER TO STAY AHEAD IN THE DATA CENTRE INDUSTRY, STAVROULAKIS EXPLAINS THAT YOU NEED TO THINK, DESIGN, AND BUILD AHEAD OF THE CURVE” 18
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ahead, as opposed to before COVID-19, when you could just think of the next one or two,” Stavroulakis adds. Building for the future “Green power is going to be immensely important over the next few years. Customers are looking for end-to-end services that include green power and we're developing the solutions to meet those needs,” says Hawkins. “Our focus at SpaceDC is to provide technically focused and green-driven data centre development in Asia. Our mission is to be a one-stopshop for customers looking to expand in both mature and emerging markets.” In the coming years, SpaceDC is set to grow, not only in Indonesia - where the company is
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already exploring projects in other cities outside Jakarta - but across emerging markets throughout SEA. The plan, Hawkins explains, is to continue driving data centre standards to higher and higher levels in the markets where SpaceDC operates, while continuing to keep sustainability at the forefront of everything the company does. In order to stay ahead in the data centre industry, Stavroulakis explains that you need to think, design, and build ahead of the curve. “It takes about three to six months to design a new facility, then you have permitting, building, equipping progressing from the point where you start a project to the day when it goes online can take two to three years,” he explains. When the SpaceDC team sits down to
DID YOU KNOW...
THE OCP IN SEA Originally founded as part of Facebook, the Open Compute Project (OCP) has spent the past decade building a global community of technology leaders looking to bring the benefits of open-sourced design and manufacturing - which already has a firm foothold in the software space - to the data centre hardware industry. “JAK2 is the first OCP-ready data centre in all of SEA. Besides the facility being OCP-ready, we've also achieved Colo Solution Provider Status from the OCP, which translates to our offerings having a strong technical service and support capability, which enables our customers to scale their deployments of OCP infrastructure,” says Hawkins. “It's really exciting to be a part of the OCP community. It really helps to distinguish us as a brand in terms of being part of the same community as tech giants like Google and Facebook, and it helps us position ourselves as a brand that our customers can depend on to deliver world-class solutions.”
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JAK2: BREAKING THE MOULD
CASE STUDY...
SpaceDC’s first Indonesian data centre, JAK2, came online in the midst of COVID-19 - amid social distancing, lockdowns, supply chain disruptions and travel bans. With most of its team based in Singapore, the company had to get creative with the process of, as Harrington describes it, “building a data centre from the ground up, from another country altogether.”
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From using modularised, containerised, prefabricated construction techniques, to virtual site inspections - which then became virtual customer tours - SpaceDC has adapted well to the unexpected and unprecedented constraints of data centre construction in the age of COVID-19.
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JAK2 at a glance: Capacity: 1.45 MW Average density design: 3.8kW per rack (maximum of 15kW per rack) Uptime Institute Tier III certification 99.982% availability PUE rating of 1.3
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plan the next generation of facilities, the key is to “always be looking at that next wave of innovations and ways to create efficiencies. If we sat down and designed our data centres to look like the ones that are operating today, by the time they came to market, they'd already be a few years behind the curve. Designing for the future is a huge focus for us.” This cutting edge design, Harrington adds, is only as effective as the team behind its day-to-day operations. “You can build an amazing data centre, but if you don't operate it right and have the right team in place, it doesn't matter,” she says. “I can say unequivocally that, in our operation team, the left hand definitely knows what the right hand is doing.
COVID-19 placed a huge task in front of them and, as a company, we're immensely proud of the work that they've done.” For Hawkins, as the originator and guiding force behind SpaceDC’s strategic direction, the ID01 campus is just the beginning. “It’s the start of a broader strategy for us in SEA. We're very much looking to provide capacity for our customers to grow,” he says. “We're embracing the challenge of driving data centre standards in Indonesia, and we look forward to continuing in the future, not just in Indonesia, but in other countries as well.”
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