Modular data center provider Etix Everywhere is planning to build a facility in the Swedish Laplands, in a remote village called Jokkmokk. It will be doing so in partnership with Nordic data center provider ArcticSites.
Construction on the facility, which is to be designed to Uptime Institute’s Tier III standards, will only begin once pre-orders reach a volume of “around a few hundred kVA,” according to Jörgen Venot, Etix Everywhere’s senior VP for Northern countries. Once this is attained, the company has guaranteed that it can deploy the data center within 16 weeks.
Etix in Jokkmokk
In its first phase, the facility will offer 0.6MW of power supply, but this will be scalable to 19MW without further expansion. And if the site were to expand, ArcticSites states it has 29MW ”already available for growth” and 40MW ”upon request.”
The data center will be built adjacent to the Porjus hydroelectric power station, which has a capacity of 480MW, and will be powered exclusively by renewable energy. Its location will allow for the facility’s IT equipment to be cooled using an indirect free cooling system.
“As a rule of thumb, an indirect free cooling design sharply reduces power consumption, and together with the local connectivity, will grant companies and organizations with a highly competitive infrastructure to support their digital transformation in Sweden,” said Jonas Sukloed, director of ArcticSites.
“On top of this, the expected uptime increases significantly compared to an ordinary server room.”
Etix uses its own perimeter-security technology and will monitor the data center remotely from its network operations center in Luxembourg.
The Luxembourg-based start-up currently runs two French data centers, one in Belgium and another in Morocco. It began construction on the Queensway Park facility in Scotland and on a data center in Senegal in 2016, but these are yet to be officially launched. The company states that it is currently developing data center projects in five African countries, seven European countries and four US States. Last year, it launched two offices in North America.