ROOT Data Center: Energy-Efficient Colocation Services

AJ Byers, President & CEO

In the U.S. alone, data centers are projected to increase their annual electricity consumption to roughly 140 billion kilowatt-hours by 2020. This represents the equivalent output of 17 new power plants, ultimately costing businesses $13 billion annually in electricity bills, while subjecting the environment to nearly 150 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year.

Headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, ROOT Data Center specializes in next-generation colocation services that go beyond security and reliability. Along with its industry-leading deployment speed, energy efficiency, and power density solutions, the company assists enterprises around the world to achieve their data center sustainability goals. Committed to energy efficiency, ROOT data centers consume 30 percent less energy than the industry average.

ROOT’s Montreal location is in itself a major benefit to its customers’ environmental mandates. Nearly 100 percent of the energy generated by the local utility, Hydro-Quebec, comes from hydroelectricity, a clean form of energy that produces greenhouse gas emissions that are 50 times lower than natural gas, five times lower than solar power and about equal to wind power. Hydropower also provides stable electricity rates that are unaffected by fluctuating oil prices. In fact, according to the “North America Data Center Outlook” report by JLL, Montreal’s annual energy costs are four times lower than in California, nearly 3.7 times lower than New York, and twice as low as Toronto.

Data centers use about four to five percent of all the electricity in the world

ROOT Data Center also leverages a unique systems design that facilitates free air-cooling in its data centers for 90 percent of the year. A significant portion of data center energy consumption is dedicated to cooling requirements. Consistently cool temperature in the data center, as well as in each cabinet with a maximum power load per rack of 40kW compared to the 3kW to 5kW capacity of most other North American data centers, allows ROOT’s colocation customers to achieve cost savings of up to 20 per cent.

“Data centers use about four to five percent of all the electricity in the world,” comments AJ Byers, President and CEO of ROOT Data Center, “so fortunately, we’ve designed a greener and more economical way to cool and power our facility, while achieving PUE metric of 1.17.”

One would think that with such an emphasis on data center energy efficiency and sustainability that scalability or deployment speed would be adversely affected, but with ROOT such is not the case. ROOT’s high-density data center environment allows for efficient use of cabinet space, future proof dense servers and greater scalability, along with the ability to accommodate the most advanced and high density servers today. The scalability and performance of its high density power solutions guarantees long-term growth for its customers. While most competitors average out to 3-5 kW, ROOT averages 6-7 kW and can reach the 35-40 kW range, depending on customer requirements.

As for deployment speed, ROOT can deploy retail-sized customers in less than 24 hours and deliver a new facility for large-scale deployments in 90 to 120 days. Its customers include multinational enterprises, cloud hosting providers, telecommunications service providers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and one of the largest hyperscale technology providers in the world.

ROOT is looking into deploying the same methodology in data centers in Northern Europe and South America. ROOT Data Center has also worked with Green Grid, an organization that enhances IT sustainability around the world and assists data centers to control carbon emissions and water utilization.