Romonet announced at Datacenter Dynamics’ London 2013 conference that it has been appointed by Virtus to assist with its TCO and performance optimisation analysis on LONDON2; Virtus’ new flagship data centre facility in West London. The analysis, based on Romonet’s proprietary data centre performance analysis and optimisation software and extensive database, will help Virtus make important technology and operational decisions.

The new Virtus facility is designed to meet the growing demand for scalable, reliable, on-demand collocation services and will be the first in London to deploy a new ground breaking fresh-air, evaporative cooling technology that dramatically decreases energy consumption, bringing site power usage effectiveness (PUE) to below 1.2, delivering substantial savings to Virtus’ clients. The Romonet analysis results help Virtus to demonstrate the performance of their facility to their customers with a high degree of accuracy and confidence.

Neil Cresswell, CEO of Virtus commented, “We chose Romonet as our preferred partner for this project because they were able to provide a turnkey solution covering a comprehensive assessment of the new eco efficient design, construction of the facility and subsequent operation on completion. While we were confident that the design delivered the lowest TCOs for our customers, the Romonet report was able to reinforce this for us.” 

“We are very pleased to be working with such an innovative organization,” said Zahl Limbuwala, CEO of Romonet, “We hope that Virtus will continue to gain benefit from the results of the study; in particular the modelling work around the financial and efficiency implications of decisions that must be made through the life cycle of a new facility.”

Romonet introduced its award winning Romonet Software Suite in November 2010 with the aim of helping businesses run their data centres in a more efficient and cost effective manner. The unique predictive modeling capabilities of the product allow its clients to control costs and reduce risk, by improving financial forecasting of data center equipment, IT platforms & workloads.

Because Romonet models the environment rather than metering it, the software can provide decision-making data before decisions are made, enabling organisations to make more informed decisions.

Virtus Goes Greener

Virtus Data Centres has announced it has secured a new power contract with E.ON for its LON1 London data centre facility — using only energy generated from fully renewable sources.

As part of its £1bn renewable energy programme, E.ON will be supplying Virtus with energy from within its portfolio of renewable sources, including on and off shore wind farms, biomass power stations and wave energy projects.

This means that all of the collocation customers within the Virtus LON1 facility will benefit from ‘green’ energy and will not be liable to pay the Climate Change Levy (CCL).

“Securing a fully renewable energy contract represents excellent value for our tenants and reinforces Virtus’ commitment to sustainability” commented Neil Cresswell, CEO at Virtus Data Centres. “Combined with our Eco-Engineering principles, the new contract further enhances the environmental credentials of our LON1 data centre. I am delighted that Virtus will now be providing customers with 100 per cent renewable energy. This further delivers on our commitment towards providing sustainable and environmentally efficient solutions which not only reduce the carbon footprint of our customers but provide the lowest costs for customers seeking high quality, flexible carrier neutral data centre solutions in London.”

The Virtus LON1 Tier 3 data centre features dual-resilient 8 Megawatt 11kV diverse electricity feeds. The site is located in Enfield, North East London and perfectly positioned for synchronous data replication to inner London locations with a 0.17 millisecond round trip latency — making it technically and physically close to both the City of London and Canary Wharf.

The LON1 data centre is also host to the newly launched CoLo-on-Demand service launched recently by Virtus which makes data centre collocation readily accessible and affordable for Cloud Service Providers.

The Climate Change Levy (CCL) is an energy tax to encourage business users to become more energy efficient, and to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. Opting to use energy from a low CO2 source as Virtus has now done — such as wind, solar, geothermal, landfill gas, or good quality CHP (combined heat and power) — gives exemption from the levy to customers of Virtus’ already highly energy efficient LON1 data centre.