RED-designed Capgemini Merlin Wins European Green Data Centre Award

The new Capgemini Merlin data centre in Swindon has been named European Green Data Centre of the Year at the Data Centre Leaders Awards 2010, held last month. Merlin opened in October 2010 and is believed to be the most energy-efficient data centre in the world.

The 25 judges, comprising CEOs, IT directors, engineers and environmental experts from companies and organisations such as Tesco, Computacentre, Dell, Fujitsu, Morgan Stanley and the British Computer Society, agreed that Merlin demonstrated outstanding success in balancing the need for high performance with the achievement of measurable environmental and sustainability objectives.

The award was received at an awards dinner at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, London, by David Fitzpatrick, Vice President of European Infrastructure Outsourcing at Capgemini, who said:

"Winning this important award is a tremendous tribute to the skills, innovative ideas and sheer hard work of our Merlin team. We are already reaping the commercial rewards of our investment as clients hasten to benefit from the cost savings that our energy-efficient Merlin centre offers."

Paul Anderson, Programme Director at Capgemini UK, who had overall responsibility for the Merlin project, said:

"We always knew that Merlin was going to be a world-beater from the day it opened for business, but it is wonderful to have independent confirmation of our views from some of the world’s top experts."

Merlin is the first data centre to use the wholly modular BladeRoom system, designed by RED for BladeRoom Data Centres in Cheltenham. The RED BladeRoom team is led by Nick Vaney.