Dublin Datacenter Recognized by Industry as the Best European Enterprise Datacenter Facility

Last week, at the 6th Data Centres Europe 2010 Conference, our Dublin datacenter received a prestigious award for being the Best European Enterprise Datacenter Facility. The Dublin datacenter incorporates a free air cooling design and is one of the most energy efficient facilities Microsoft has designed and built so far. Beyond the dramatic reduction in power consumption, the removal of traditional cooling systems negates the need for a chiller plant, allowing us to avoid the typical consumption of around 18 million liters of water each month. This design shows what is possible when you innovate locally and design facilities which take advantage of the natural environmental benefits around you.

This most recent award is the third time that our Dublin datacenter has won an award over the last year. Other awards include the Datacentre Leaders Award for Innovation and the European Code of Conduct for Data Centre Sustainability Best Practice. These awards highlight our fresh approach used in Dublin where we integrated new design solutions to achieve greater efficiencies and waste reductions. 

In addition to awards won by our Dublin datacenter, our Chicago datacenter also won the Green Enterprise IT Award from the Uptime Institute for the bold IT initiatives we utilized in designing the facility. The Chicago datacenter integrates new design solutions which have led to greater efficiencies and carbon waste reductions. This includes a significant reduction in water and material usage enabled by the deployment of containers and other IT innovations.

I’m extremely proud of the hard work put forth by my team in making our award-winning datacenters a reality and for everyone responsible for running the day-to-day operations of Microsoft’s datacenters. Your ingenuity in designing and operating more energy efficient datacenters that produce less waste has been recognized by the industry and I have no doubt that we’ll achieve even greater results this coming year. Great job!