Data Center-as-a-Service pioneer ECL has announced the world’s first modular, sustainable, off-grid data center that uses green hydrogen as its primary power source. ECL will deliver data centers in 1MW blocks with 99.9999 percent uptime. The company also announced USD 7 million in seed financing co-led by Molex Ventures and Hyperwise Ventures. The funds will be used by ECL to expand its market presence and in the construction of its first data center at the company’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, with completion scheduled for Q2 2023.

Optimized for use by mid-sized data center operators, typically large companies with a mix of cloud and on-premises IT environments, ECL’s Datacenter-as-a-Service is two-thirds the total cost of ownership of traditional colocation data center providers when measured over five years. The community-integrated data center design consumes no local resources, including power or water, and operates with zero emissions at extremely low noise levels. ECL’s modularity and lack of dependence on local utilities also means that its data centers can be designed and delivered much faster than others’, reducing planning and construction cycles from between 18 to 24 months to between six and nine months.

While other data center providers have deployed hydrogen fuel cells as backup power supplies, and with some conducting trials of systems forecast for production delivery in three-to-five years, ECL is the first provider to deliver a fully-green hydrogen-powered data center. This leapfrog innovation is enabled by bringing together several disruptive technologies including green hydrogen-based power generation, battery energy storage and highly reliable power architecture without dependence on the utility grid. This maximizes efficiency and time to delivery and all but eliminates waste.

ECL cooling innovations enable much higher density-per-rack than traditional data center providers, a strong benefit given the increasing per-server power consumption driven by accelerating chip and system density. Water created as a by-product of hydrogen-based power generation is used to cool ECL’s server racks, eliminating the need for external water sources. Combining this with proprietary rear door heat PUE ratios than any other colocation data center provider.

With PUE of 1 representing optimal efficiency, traditional colocation providers average approximately 1.57 across all their data centers with the best-of-class able to achieve approximately 1.2 with an average of eight kilowatts of power per rack. ECL will achieve PUE of 1.05 across all of its data centers, with up to 50 kilowatts per rack. By achieving meaningfully lower PUE ratios and higher rack densities, ECL’s customers will benefit from significantly lower cost of real estate, space and power consumption.

ECL data centers feature an advanced full data center management system ECL Lightning, which is used to monitor and control every aspect of the ECL data center, from power generation to power delivery and rack cooling, in real time. Its unique and intuitive UI provides comprehensive, clear and simple monitoring, which enables finite control of all aspects of operating the data center.

Networking Flexibility Enables Wide Range of Locations

ECL data centers are built on their customers’ sites of choice, with or without existing network access. When no fiber is present at the selected site, an ECL partner provides a fiber backbone along with cloud interconnection via its network-as-a-service platform, while ECL provides last-mile access using the customer’s provider of choice. This flexibility in network provisioning, coupled with ECL’s green hydrogen-based primary power, means that data center locations no longer need to be driven by network or power grid availability.

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