The winners of the DatacenterDynamics EMEA Awards have been announced, at a glittering dinner at London’s Lancaster Hotel.

From a mightily impressive shortlist DCD’s expert judges winnowed a list of the leaders of the datacenter world in EMEA, and the industry showed up to applaud their decision. The task was harder than ever this year, reflecting the pace and competition of a datacenter market which is rapidly growing right across the region.

Without further ado, here are the winners:

Future Thinking & Design Concepts
Moving your applications into the cloud might seem to dissolve distance, but Equinix realised it also means that firms may actually be closer to their partners than they realise. Equinix Cloud Exchange lets customers interconnect their cloud applications and services automatically, creating fast flexible hybrid solutions.

Data Center Blueprints
The UK’s academic network Janet/JISC won the blueprints contest with a design produced by Infinity SDC, for a shared 2.25MW data center supporting academia and medical research. The design includes indirect evaporative cooling which supports densities of 4kW to 30kW in the same hall.

Innovation in the Micro-Data Center
Spain’s SummuS won the award for small-scale innovation. Spain’s only data center devoted to 3D rendering, SummuS Render uses HP blades for high performance computing, operates and 25kW per rack, and recycles waste heat in surrounding offices.
 

Innovation in the Medium-Data Center
Leicester City Council’s carbon-neutral cooled data center is a worthy winner. Workspace Technology built a facility with 3.5kW of solar power fresh air cooling - and a PUE of less than 1.1.

Innovation in the Mega-Data Center
Infinity won again in the mega data center category with its Janet/JISC data center, that uses modular designs to support multiple demands in one hall whilst still maintining efficiency.

Leadership in the Public Sector
The public sector makes up 50 percent of the UK’s data center industry, and is rapidly innovating. The carbon neutral data center Workspace Technology built for Leicester City Council picked this award: the council demolished a legacy data center in a 1960s building, replacing it with a leading edge facility in a re-purposed building - which can also support shared services with third parties.

Innovations in Outsourcing
The outsourcing award goes to Equinix with its Cloud Exchange (ECX) which lets firm automatically connect their services with others to create orchestrated applications.

The ‘Green’ Data Center
The best green data center of 2014, in the judge’s opinion, is Portugal Telecom’s Covilha facility (above), which gets energy from a wind and solar farm, and has LEED Gold certification … and it also looks stunning.

Improved Data Center Energy Efficiency
Virgin Media won our award for improvement, with Projects Red to Green, which benchmarked its top energy consuming sites and applied best practices to make them more efficient. Virgin saved 15GWh (yes, 15 million kWh) and £1.35 million, without sacrificing resilience or scalability. It sliced 0.47 off its average PUE, starting from the solid engineering priniciple of instrumentatation, because, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t monitor it”.

Innovation in IT Optimisation   
The National Bank of Abu Dhabi managed to shrink its rack space by 40 percent using virtualization, at the same time as cutting its power usage by 150kVA, and reducing its needs for cooling. Switching off CRAC units in the national bank of a hot country might sound risky, but head of IT infrastructure Ayman Al-Qudsi kept a cool head.

Modular Deployment of the Year
Our modular data center winner, Green Mountain showed one of the main benefits of the modular concept immediately. The success of the company’s first facility, deep underground by a Norwegian fjord, led to a second site at Telemark, which went from client to instruction to completion in six months, and was built in weather conditions that went down to -17C, with up to two metres of snow. The site uses chilled water for cooling and is ready for expansion.

Young Mission Critical Engineer of the Year
James Rowse of Red Engineering was an undergraduate intern in June 2012, quickly moving to full time staff and took a key role in a 10,000 square metre data center build in Turkey. Aged 24, he’s now working on a master’s degree while playing his part in Red’s international work.

Data Center ‘Special Assignment’ Team of the Year
Facebook’s data center within the Arctic Circle at Lulea has been one of the biggest data center stories of recent years, and its expansion involved the creation of a new “flat pack” style of quick-assembly racks, which arrive onsite pre-prepared and ready for rapid installation. Set up in August 2013, tThe team that developed it included staff from Emerson, Tyrens, Cundall and SPARCH, spread round the globe with multiple languages and timezones. the team worked on the flatpack systems, as well as a flat concret base and new building to hold them.

Business Leader of the Year
Simon Segars has been with ARM since 1991. An engineer by trade, he led the development of the hugely successful ARM7 and ARM9 processor families, and held a variety of executive positions before replacing Warren East at the helm of the company. Now he’s firmly moving it into the data center space. The award was collected on his behalf by a colleague.

Outstanding Contribution to the Industry
Paolo Bertoldi has been working with the European Commission since 1986, conducting research in the areas of nuclear fusion and energy management.

In May 2001, he took the office of the principal administrator at the European Commission Joint Research Centre - the organisation responsible for European Code of Conduct for Data Centres. This voluntary scheme aims to create a European version of initiatives like the American ‘Energy Star’ and ‘Save Energy Now’ or the global ‘Green Grid’.

In his role at JRC, Bertolli developed energy efficiency recommendations, best practices and targets that simultaneously lower the TCO and carbon emissions.

The full shortlist is here