Last year Contabo was already honored and received the German Data Center Award 2017 for the modernization of its data center in Nuremberg. Now we took part in this year’s contest as well and faced the competition with our modernization measures that have been recently performed at our data center in Munich.
This year’s ceremony was held on April 24th 2018, and the winners of the “Deutscher Rechenzentrumspreis 2018” (German Data Center Award 2018) were honored. Again, and just like last year, an independent jury of data center experts and planners decided which of the 51 submitted data center projects would receive the award. The jury placed particular emphasis on the innovative to visionary character of the data center projects as well as on the energy efficiency which can be achieved in data center operations.
Once again, we have won the first place in category 6 – “Increase in energy efficiency through reconstruction in an existing data center” – this time with our data center located in Munich, and consequently received the German Data Center Award 2018.
This means that both of our data centers have received the German Data Center Award – a huge acknowledgement of all our modernization efforts in recent years and we are very happy about that.
In the course of the energetic optimization of our now award-winning data center in Munich all chillers which had been in use for cooling the data center were replaced by a groundwater cooling system. Now only a few pumps with a low power consumption are sufficient in order to reliably supply the entire data center with cooling – thanks to groundwater which is cool all year long.
Not only you, our valued customers benefit from this measure due to decreasing energy demand and thus rental costs for the server operation: Due to the low power consumption for the data center cooling, the environment is best protected and the groundwater flows back to the soil unchanged.
All this work was carried out without any interruption of the operation of your servers, thanks to extensive planning and project scheduling as well as precautionary activities. We have thousands of servers online in our data center in Munich, and all these actions were performed noiseless.
The PUE value (PUE = “Power Usage Effectiveness”) of our data center in Munich could be reduced from 1.4 to less than 1.1 and at the same time, the cooling power was increased. Power capacity which was up to now reserved for peak loads of the chillers in midsummer could be used to accommodate hundreds of new servers in the data center. The electricity requirement for cooling the entire data center is thus negligible for us for the first time – throughout the whole year.