We’re pleased to provide a link to quite a good general article about the Irish data centre market with comments on many of the carrier neutral operators as well as the growing list of corporate owned and operated facilities. 

Remember, Dublin is home to a number of large US technology companies who run their entire European operations from the city.  For example Mircosoft only recently opened the first phase of its enormous 300,000 sq ft Dublin data centre with an initial 5.4MW of capacity, but the site can scale to over 20MW.  This facility is located on the Grange Castle Business Park in Clondalkin.  Of course such large scale corporate demand in what is by European standards quite a small market must provide some competition for good sites for data centre development (ie primarily those with lots of power), so making life quite tough for the local colo operators.  However, with both Data Electronics and Interxion both recently expanding their operations it would appear they have found a way to progress despite this additional pressure. 

As for the main point of the article, that Ireland will be seen as a “green data” centre location, the argument is very much based on the premis that as many Irish data centres are new they are more efficient, a concept thats hard to argue with but hardly a unique characteristic.  Indeed whilst it is clearly the case the new and therefore more efficient data centres are clearly greener than older facilities, the main focus on “green” in data centres is surely on sources of power, ie using green or renewable power supplies and its countries that score well on this front who perhaps have the strongest card to play, for example the Scandinavian countries with abundant hydro power and even Iceland who make a play on their abundant thermal energy.