The winners of the Data Centre World Awards 2023 were announced during a grand ceremony at Data Centre World on 8 March, taking place at ExCeL London.
The awards recognised the people, innovations, and operations within the data centre industry that have gone above and beyond to achieve outstanding excellence in the sector.
Special Contribution to Improving Energy Efficiency
WINNER: EkkoSense (on behalf of Three UK)
Three UK worked with EkkoSense to secure initial cooling energy savings across four sites of 200KW, representing a 10-15% data centre cooling energy saving in just 10 weeks.
Most Successfully Delivered Data Centre
WINNER: Vantage Data Centres
In March 2021 Vantage was contacted by one of its strategic customers who urgently needed significant IT capacity in South Africa. A few months later, Vantage commenced the build of a major carrier-neutral data centre campus in Johannesburg (JNB11), its first in Africa. Delivery took place ahead of schedule in just 10 months, with zero lost-time incidents over 1.5 million working hours.
Green Data Centre of the Year
WINNER: CSC IOT Centre for Science
CSC is the hosting entity and data centre provider for EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputer LUMI. The LUMI site in Kajaani, Finland was selected due to availability of vast amount of local renewable energy and ability to utilise excess heat in to town’s district heating system. While having the potential of reducing 12,400 tons of CO2 annually, LUMI is able to save up to 40% of electricity costs by selling the waste heat.
Best Data Centre Operator
WINNER: Vantage Data Centres
Vantage CWL11 Cardiff meets global, national and regional demand for colocation and hosting, all from a highly scalable single site campus at pricing half that of London. Opened for business in 2010, CWL11 is a continuously evolving colocation data centre operated by Vantage Data Centers, which acquired the 50-acres site from Next Generation Data (NGD) in July 2020. There has not been a single outage since the facility was opened in 2009.
Environmental Product of the Year
WINNER: Interact
Interact offers a machine learning tool that addresses these issues by balancing embodied carbon, materials usage, and energy efficiency to get the best net environmental outcome. Its recommendations enable data centre managers to achieve the same or greater amount of compute power, with drastically reduced server footprint and energy draw.
Special Contribution to Improving Resilience Through Innovation
WINNER: ICTS
ICTS’ Viridian started out as a simple dashboard, but through extensive consultation with data centre clients, it expanded into something much bigger. Viridian brings data centres physical security solutions together in one single, customisable platform. Data streams are contextualised dynamically assess risk and calculate optimal service delivery paths based on live-threat data and operational activities. ICTS incorporates all site-specific security procedures, KPIs, and the SLA into Viridian.
Best Talent Developer
WINNER: UTC Heathrow and partners
UTC Heathrow and Partners provides an education that encourages life-long learning by empowering students with transferrable engineering skills to become responsible engineers to meet the needs of the data centre sector today and tomorrow. The ten partners supporting the Digital Futures programme include CNet Training, Virtus Data Centres, CyrusOne, CBRE, Amazon Web Services, LMG, ARK Data Centres (Crown Hosting Data Centres Limited), Yondr, Kao Data and Soben.
Innovation Product of the Year
WINNER: QiO Technologies
QiO Technologies are an industrial IoT AI software products company supporting energy-intensive and asset-heavy industrial sector companies to rapidly deliver on their sustainability and net zero agenda.
