At this year’s IMN Financing, Investing & Real Estate Development for Data Centres Forum, I joined the brilliant Jean-Simon Venne, Vice President-Energy Efficiency, SMi-Enerpro, to discuss datacenter design, implementation and construction. Our session on Day 1, combined with the Green Data Centres, Data Centre Energy Efficiency and ROI/Payback debate, saw many great and discerning arguments raised.

One discussion I was particularly involved in was around the idea that clients aren’t asking for modular and ‘green’ approaches from real estate giants. My counterpoint to this argument was that without utilising the modular approach, clients potentially miss the great CAPEX opportunity that this typically offers. Equally, from an OPEX perspective, the modular benefits of free cooling and reduced temperatures are unexploited. It is therefore the responsibility of the datacenter industry to educate customers on these issues as they often fall under the radar of many CIOs and CFOs, which is therefore the reason many businesses don’t opt for them.

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