Introducing Data Center Excellence

In this series we talk to some of our members about sustainability, the SDIA, and their future plans. First up is Fridtjof Chwoyka from Data Center Excellence, Senior Consultant and one of the founders of the company.

Could you tell us a bit more about Data Center Excellence?

Data Center Excellence (DCE) is a small, young consulting company founded in 2020. Our focus is on sustainability for data centers. We now have three employees, who are also the founders of the company. We all have a background in data centre consultancy, and decided we wanted continue this work.

How important is sustainability within your organisational strategy?

For DCE, sustainability is the most important part in our structure. We build everything around sustainability: for ourselves, our kids, our customers, and for our planet. There is no planet B! In every project we do with our customers, sustainability is on the agenda. Since we are a consultancy company, we inform the customer where they are at the moment in terms of sustainability from our point of view. We show them the path to a carbon free data center. We assess the technology that is in place, and show what technology needs to be replaced to make the data center carbon free. There is no specific technology that we support as the best or most sustainable technology for a data center. Instead, we offer our customers tailored solutions to reach the sustainability goals for data centers set by the European Union by 2030.

What are the key challenges you and your customers face?

Data center owners do not always know how their data center is running. One of the key indicators of a data center is power usage effectiveness, or PUE. This is one of the most common indicators to benchmark how much additional energy a data center consumes. They only see the costs of the energy and they do not always look at the sustainability side of it. 

We also help with standards and certifications that data centers need to meet. For example, the EN50600 data center standard is not directly focused on sustainability, but it is a target of the standard to design, build, and operate the data center. We have to benchmark to this standard, and see where we can improve the data center in terms of sustainability.

Why was it important for you to become a member of the SDIA, and how can we help you?

When we work on a data center, we meet many different people. Everyone has very good ideas, but they are not always aligned. The SDIA can help us get all the people we need together, because in current projects we do not see each other. If we work together, we will be able to build the sustainable data center of the future! In this process, we can help others with understanding the whole process in the data center, since we have the general overview of the data center, which is unique.

We hope that the SDIA can help us build our network and find new collaborations. Its platform is valuable for us. In the future, we hope to participate in one of the working groups as well.

What are the future plans of DC-E that we should look out for?

Our company is only six months old, so we hope to just keep running as we are now. We hope that Data Center Excellence grows a lot and gets attention in the future. We also hope to find new opportunities for us and see how it goes in the upcoming one or two years!

Thank you for this interesting conversation! Over the next weeks we hope to introduce more of our members and their ideas on sustainability, the SDIA, and the exciting future ahead of them, so stay tuned for more!