Following months of deliberations, DCD has announced the winners of the annual DCD Awards , celebrating the industry’s best data center projects and most talented people.
The winners received their trophies on Thursday evening, at a gala ceremony held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, hosted by comedian Stephen K. Amos.
The finalists were selected by an independent panel of data center experts from hundreds of entries, submitted by contestants from across the world.
Click here to see the names of all the finalists .
Edge Data Center Project of the Year
Winner: DellEMC
In collaboration with Keysource
This award recognizes unique and strategic approaches to housing IT at the edge that can act as an exemplar to the wider industry.
The micro Modular Data Centres (MDCs) designed by DellEMC’s Extreme Scale Infrastructure team, helped a multinational automotive company in the roll-out of its connected vehicle technology - deploying semi-autonomous vehicles.
Category sponsor: Cupertino Electric Inc
Enterprise Data Center Design Award
Winner: DUG GeoSolutions
In collaboration with Skybox Data Centers, Critical Project Services
This award recognizes innovation in data center design within the enterprise space, Often referred to as on-premise data centers, they make up a large part of the global data center inventory.
Completely designed in-house, the DUG 250 Petaflops, 15MW High Performance Cluster is entirely cooled by complete liquid immersion. They use their supercomputer to produce high quality seismic processing services.
Category sponsor: DigiPlex
Multi Tenant Data Center Design Award
Winner: AirTrunk
This award recognizes innovation in greenfield and brownfield data center design within the faced paced colocation sector.
AirTrunk has developed a range of innovative designs that aim to increase the speed of deployment, deliver an industry-low PUE, ensure customer flexibility and customization while minimizing costs at its rapidly expanding 130MW capacity campus in Western Sydney.
Category sponsor: Schneider Electric
Hyperscale Data Center Innovation Award
Winner: CyrusOne
This award recognizes original designs or technological solutions within the hyperscale data center segment that will benefit the wider data center community
At over a million square feet, CyrusOne's Kincora is one of the largest data centers in North America with a contiguous floor plate on two floors. Sterling 6 is phase 2 and was built to accommodate a hyperscale customer. The ‘Massively Modular’™ approach means that additional buildings can be deployed in as little as 12 weeks
Category sponsor: Muliplex
Hybrid IT Project of the Year
Winner: L&T Metro Rail Hyderabad
This award recognizes innovative approaches to IT service delivery that span across cloud, on-premise and a multitude of other infrastructures, platforms, and services.
The Hyderabad Metro Rail Project is the world's Largest Public-Private Partnership Project (PPP) in the Metro Sector. The project has harnessed the power of multiple clouds alongside on-premise IT, to build towards the rapid scaling of metro operations.
Category sponsor: Uptime Institute
Data Center Modernization Project of the Year
Winner: ServerFarm
In collaboration with i3Solutions
This award recognizes innovation when it comes to the upgrade and retrofit of existing data centers.
ServerFarm acquired a 120,000 sq ft, 10.5MW data center originally commissioned in 2002 that was operating well below its design capacity and through a program of capital expenditure managed to optimize facility performance and institute a new operations management model without impacting existing tenants.
Category sponsor: CEEDA
Energy Smart Award
Winner: CoolDC
In collaboration with Asperitas & Rittal
This award recognizes the world’s most energy-aware and innovative approaches to building sustainable digital infrastructure.
Eschewing traditional air-cooling in favor of liquid-based technologies, LDC utilizes a combination of the most energy-efficient cooling solutions in a design that facilitates a *collectively* more efficient output.
Category sponsor: Starline
Mission Critical Tech Innovation Award
Winner: Zutacore
In collaboration with the Open19 Foundation
This award recognizes cutting-edge technology solutions from the world of critical power, cooling tech, monitoring and operational management systems.
ZutaCore’s HyperCool2 direct-on-chip evaporative cooling technology brings a unique combination of self-regulation, on-demand and low-pressure in a single system.
Category sponsor: CBRE Data Centre Solutions
Data Center Operations Team of the Year
Winner: Rack Centre
This award recognizes teams convened for a special task, at any stage in the data center life cycle, which goes above and beyond day-to-day operations.
Despite a very challenging operating terrain, characterized by lack of reliable grid power and limited access to skill sets, the team has continued to achieve set objectives at Nigeria’s first carrier-neutral Tier III colocation data center, using purely local talent.
Category sponsor: DCPRO
Data Center Manager of the Year
Winner: Farooq Al-Jwesm, Saudi Aramco
This award is about recognizing exceptional managers who span the chasm between IT and facilities and triumph in difficult situations.
Over and above the daily duties of data center manager at what is reputedly the world's most profitable company, Farooq has demonstrated an aptitude for solving engineering problems - which are many when your data centers are distributed across harsh environments. For his efforts, he has been granted two patents by the US patent office.
Category sponsor: EkkoSense
Data Center Construction Team of the Year
Winner: Virtus
In collaboration with Bouygues Energies & Services
This award is about recognizing the commitment and initiative shown by teams that deliver something better than expected.
Dealing with challenging local planning requirements, and product recalls mid-construction, the various teams pulled together to deliver the Virtus 5 project on time, on budget and to quality.
Category sponsor: Vertiv
Nonprofit Industry Initiative of the Year
Winner: Boden Type DC
In collaboration with EcoCooling, H1 Systems, Fraunhofer IOSB, RISE & Boden Agency
This award is about recognizing the great initiatives to educate and influence the data center sector that NGOs, professional bodies and academia put together.
Funded by the European Horizon 2020 project, this prototype 500kW facility in the small town of Boden uses every trick in the book to lower its environmental impact: it runs on renewable energy and doesn't have batteries or gensets.
Category sponsor: DCD
Corporate Social Responsibility Award
Winner: Salute
In collaboration with EdgeConneX
This award recognizes organizations that have managed to forge a winning strategy for the triple bottom line: people, planet, and profit, aligning their business goals with those of the wider community.
Salute has taken a potentially vulnerable group of people (some recruits were actually homeless when hired) and used their mission-critical aptitudes to transform them into world-class data center technicians, at the same time addressing the data center skills shortage.
Category sponsor: iMasons
Young Mission Critical Engineer of the Year
Winner: Sarah Davey, Arup
This award recognizes the best of the next generation of mission-critical engineer community needs a new generation
Sarah has demonstrated a maturity well beyond her years in terms of taking responsibility for major clients; the size and scope of those projects on which she has also taken responsibility and the thought she has put into relating her work experience to its broader impact on design engineering.
In one instance she developed a prefabricated reference design that reduces time to market and is now favored by the client to deploy in new untested locations.
Category sponsor: Google
Public Vote: Best Mainstream Press Coverage of the Data Center Industry
Winner: Adam Satariano, The New York Times
This year's public vote category recognizes journalists and mainstream publications which have helped the data center community by delivering useful information about the sector to a broader audience.
More than 400 votes were cast worldwide to determine the winner of this Award.
And the winner is: The New York Times | How the Internet Travels Across Oceans
Category sponsor: Quality Uptime Services
Business Leader of the Year
Winner: Peder Nærbø, Bulk Infrastructure
This award recognizes a company or individual who, in the view of the judges, has done the most over the past 12 months to build the profile of the data center industry to key stakeholder groups whether they be investors, shareholders, financiers, owners, operators, the media and/or government.
This year’s winner personifies not only the entrepreneurial approach to doing business but also the strong sense of social responsibility and environmental stewardship that we need to see more of.
He moved from shipping to data centers a decade ago and - with that logistics mentality - soon realized that connectivity would hold him and the rest of the country’s industry back, making it more difficult to unlock the full potential of Norway’s green energy opportunity. Rather than wait for consensus and government support he went ahead and used his own money - a novelty in the modern age - and built the first subsea cable connecting Norway to North America. The Havfrue cable was lit in October. All this is in parallel to his data center developments, one of which is the size of Central Park. Next, the Arctic.
Category sponsor: Portman Executive Search
Outstanding Contribution to the Data Center Industry
Winner: Gary Cook, Greenpeace
Every industry has its champions, thought leaders and pioneers who will be revered for their achievements for years to come. The previous winners of this Award are all distinguished by their extensive service to the data center industry through publication, education, developing innovation and active involvement with the data center community globally.
Tonight’s recipient of this major award started out as a much-vilified figure. Someone from outside of the industry daring to comment on its drawbacks and failures.
Working with his team at a somewhat controversial activist organization, his first report came out in 2010. It was divisive and difficult to read. People found things to criticize in it, they made excuses for why they lagged behind their competitors.
But, ultimately, they listened, and they improved.
We believe the Clicking Clean report has done more to change mindsets within the industry than many would care to admit. At such an important time, when scientific reports paint a stark future, when thousands take to the streets to protest emissions, when consumers are buying based on their carbon footprint, the quest to go green has never been more important.
Tonight’s winner saw how important this cause was nearly a decade ago. Now the industry appears ready to come together to help fight this crisis.
Category sponsor: DCD
A full breakdown of the awards will be in the next issue of DCD Magazine. Subscribe for free today:
