Verne Global continues to publish useful information about why customers value green data centers. Automobile manufacturer BMW is the latest customer profiled by the company.

We took a look earlier at what customers value in a green data center. One of those customers was Colt, the information delivery platform for European businesses and a user of Verne Global's Icelandic data center. Colt continues to share what it sees as the green data center value proposition.

Colt expanded its relationship with Verne Global in June 2012. Victor Smith, Product Director at Colt Data Centre Services, tells us:

We are continually looking for ways to increase our commitment to sustainability and energy efficiency at Colt so the benefits of a 100% renewably powered data centre were immediately apparent to us. The main environmental issues for the data centre industry continue to be energy consumption and carbon footprint. Indeed, this is the case for many of our customers, so ensuring we use resources responsibly is something we are actively engaged with across all our business activities. This in turn means helping customers reduce their impact on the environment through product innovations.

There are also important considerations in terms of our bottom line costs due to increasing energy prices. With energy demand set to increase by 50% worldwide by 2030, there is a significant incentive to improve energy efficiency.

The latest announcement is that

[BMW will] move a number of power-hungry applications to the Verne Global facility, including crash simulations, aerodynamic calculations and computer aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE), all of which are critical to the development of BMW's next generation of energy efficient vehicles. HPC [high performance computing] is traditionally associated with high power consumption and carbon emissions, due to the need to both power and cool the high density servers required to run these applications. By moving ten of its HPC clusters (consuming 6.31 GW-h annually) from its German facilities to Iceland's zero emission data centre, BMW will reduce annual carbon emissions by 3,570 metric tons; the equivalent of the carbon produced by burning 1.46 million litres of petrol. The move will also enable BMW to reduce the cost of powering its HPC applications by as much as 82 percent."

Verne Global was recognized at Rio+20 as a Sustaina100 solutions company.

Image courtesy Verne Global