OVHcloud opens sustainable data centre in Sydney

French cloud computing company OVHcloud has opened a new data centre in Sydney featuring its proprietary water cooling technology.

The data centre, which OVHcloud said is its "most sustainable data centre in Australia to date," is its third in Sydney and sixth across Asia Pacific (APAC) following openings in India and Singapore over the past 14 months.

The water cooling system is built into a vertical rack designed to facilitate cooling at the server level, eliminating the need for air conditioning in server rooms.

The system requires a single glass of water to cool an OVHcloud server as the water is cooled and circulated in a closed loop.

OVHcloud's proprietary cooling technology

The company's APAC VP and general manager Terry Maiolo told CRN Australia the new Sydney data centre is the "most efficient that we will have in the region."

"Businesses at large, CEOs are making great statements about their own sustainability goals and their own carbon footprint. As such, this [data centre] is a vehicle for these organisations to achieve those goals," he said.

"Because we use less power, because we use less water, because we're cooling a chip, we actually get a lot more density into a data center as well; we use less space, [pay] less rent."

"What that means is the performance that [OVHcloud customers] can get for the price that they pay is significantly better."

OVHcloud said the new data centre's cooling technology combined with the company's cloud infrastructure will sustainably meet the growing demand for high compute cloud solutions.

The facility has also seen OVHcloud launch its scale dedicated servers for the first time in Australia, which provide "more compute power" and use AMD and Intel processors.

The company said its 43 data centres worldwide have a PUE (power usage effectiveness) as low as 1.29 and a WUE (water usage effectiveness) of 0.30l/kWh, which are "both significantly lower than the industry average."

They also boast a CUE (carbon usage effectiveness) of 0.18, which OVHcloud credits to manufacturing its own racks and servers. 

“The increased popularity of emerging technologies such as 5G, edge computing and generative AI has trigged an influx of demand for high computing performance, but many organisations are struggling to balance this need whilst keeping carbon footprints top of mind,” said Michel Paulin, CEO at OVHcloud.

“As a pioneer in water cooling technology for more than 20 years, we are confident in our ability to assist organisations in powering their businesses, and their ESG goals as well.”