Digital Realty expands in Dublin to meet increased demands of digital economy (video)

25 Nov 2015

Gary Keogh, sales director, Digital Realty in Ireland

Digital Realty, the global data centre provider, is adding a 10,000 sq ft data hall in its Dublin facility to meet the growing demand for storage and processing required by 21st-century digital enterprises, the company’s sales director in Ireland Gary Keogh said.

As part of a €150m investment, which was first announced last year, Digital Realty will add approximately 10,000 sq ft of data centre technical space to complement its current and fully-occupied approximately 10,000 sq ft data centre hall at Profile Park in Dublin. The expansion will complete the first data centre facility at the campus, still leaving green field space for future data centre builds.

Last year, Digital Realty announced that Profile Park would see a total investment of €150m into the data centre campus.  The project for the entire facility could employ as many as 50 to 120 skilled construction workers during the construction project.

Profile Park is a modern business park near Dublin’s city centre and Digital Realty’s data centre campus boasts high-speed connectivity and network access to the US, UK and Europe. The centre is also located alongside global technology leaders like Microsoft and Google. The data centre campus is being developed in compliance with BREEAM standards. The site has secured supply agreements for power from 100pc renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and hydro.

Digital Realty prepares for explosion in data

Speaking with Siliconrepublic.com, Keogh said: “This is the only data centre in Ireland that is certified by the Uptime Institute to Tier 3 both in its design and construction.

“The most important attribute of the site here is that we are using free-air cooling to cool the temperature of the data hall.

“We now have a PUE design of 1.15 for this building and what that means for customers is 30pc to 40pc savings over competitors who use mechanical refrigeration.

“This means you can launch your digital assets in this facility in Dublin and have access to 500m people in Europe and also have connectivity to the US market.”

Speaking about the trends driving the data centre business in 2015 and going into 2016, Keogh said that the most continuous trend is organisations migrating to the cloud at a phenomenal rate.

“We are now seeing the deployment of mega-scale cloud centre solutions across our data centres globally.”

Another key trend is renewable energy and Digital Realty data centres, including the data halls at Profile Park, run off 100pc renewable energy.

“The data hall that goes live in February will house 500 cabinets each supporting 4 kilowatts per cabinet density.

“The next building could house a data hall with 10,000 sq ft that could house 500 cabinets with a 6 kilowatt per cabinet density.

“This will give us the processing power, the engine room capacity, to cope with the explosion in data analytics and data processing.”

Keogh said that there is a data tsunami coming that will require the existence of data centres that can crunch through the vast amounts of data generated by everything from the cloud to internet of things devices and robotics and even, one day, driverless cars.

“This will require local and regional data centres that can ensure real-time processing of data.”

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com