VMO2’s data centre cooling optimisation will save £1m a year

News

The savings come as part of a partnership with data centre software specialist EkkoSense

According to Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), working in partnership with EkkoSense across 20 of the company’s UK data centres has led to an average saving of 15% in data centre cooling energy usage.

In environmental terms, this means reducing the company’s carbon footprint by around 760 tonnes per year. In financial terms, it’s a reduction in energy bills of over £1 million a year.

These savings have been achieved through better understanding the data centres’ existing energy usage, leveraging various monitoring and analytics solutions from EkkoSense. These include using IoT sensors, AI analytics, and digital twin technology.

“With our software collecting thousands of data points every five minutes – adding to the millions of data points already collected, we’re able to continually refine the effectiveness of our machine learning algorithms for Virgin Media O2,” said Dean Boyle, EkkoSense’s CEO. “Having access to this level of real-time insight means that Virgin Media O2’s operations team are able to track how their data centres are performing from a cooling, power and capacity perspective. They are also able to identify further energy optimisation opportunities in terms of cooling energy usage and overall savings.”

This additional insight from EkkoSense has allowed VMO2 to adjust its energy usage in real-time to meet demand, enabling them to run more efficiently.

“In partnership with EkkoSense, we’ve optimised our data centres so they operate efficiently, using real-time data so we can make airflow and cooling improvements, resulting in significant cooling energy savings,” explained Adrian Lazenby, Head of Technical Site Engineering and Delivery at VMO2.

In recent years, the data centre industry has experienced a surge in growth, much of which is related to the ongoing boom in AI. However, providing energy – particularly renewable energy – for these power-hungry data centres, remains a major challenge. Indeed, we have even seen data centre projects rejected recently due to fears that the local energy grids could not support the additional demand.

Keep up to date with all of the latest telecoms news with Total Telecom’s daily newsletter

Also in the news:
Meta resumes use of UK user posts to train its AI models
Verizon’s 4,800 job cuts will cost over $1.9 billion
CMA questions Vodafone–Three merger after second probe