Blue Chip Announces the Opening of one of Europe’s Most Energy Efficient Datacentres

July 1, 2010 - PRLog -- Bedford, UK, 1st July 2010. — Blue Chip, the information technology services specialists, announces the opening of their latest UK premier Eco Datacentre.  The development of this five-acre site offers the most up-to-date eco-friendly technology in the UK.

The £5 million datacentre, built in Bedford, UK becomes home to many of Blue Chip’s existing customers, and by expanding their portfolio of services is set to offer new clients the latest technology and services.  Housing up to 600 racks and supporting the highest levels of resilience and security, the design supports the changing needs of today’s industry, such as hosting, service management, consolidation, cloud computing and virtualization, enabling UK clients to operate their IT at optimum value for money.

The datacentre uses state-of-the art technologies that enable’s the secure flow of information to and from the customer site to the datacentre, using half the energy of data facilities of a similar size, conserving resources and savings in speed of services and operational costs.

"At more than 26,000 sq ft, our new datacentre significantly expands our offerings and abilities in meeting the demand from our customers for our hosted and managed services," Brian Meredith, Managing Director for Blue Chip. “This is the third and largest datacentre we have built and places us in an excellent position to provide and respond to the growing needs of our customers.”

To help fund the new data centre, Blue Chip received an interest-free loan from the Carbon Trust under its ‘Big Business Refit Campaign’.  The loan awarded to Blue Chip has been invested in energy-efficient cooling systems that will produce significant savings on energy bills.  The Carbon Trust is a not-for-profit company with the mission to accelerate the move to a low carbon economy, providing specialist support to business and the public sector to help cut carbon emissions, save energy and commercialise low carbon technologies.

Pierre Dufour, head of the Carbon Trust loan scheme said: “The cooling technology which Blue Chip brought with an interest-free Carbon Trust loan will enable the facility to reduce its electricity use by over 60%.  Blue Chip is just one of over 2,000 businesses taking Carbon Trust loans last year. Together they used our loans to fit £70m of energy efficient equipment – providing savings of over £20m a year, as well as 140,000 tonnes of CO2.”


The new datacentre is a 2 Mega Watt facility, making it one of the most efficient data centres in Europe. Electricity consumption is a major concern but with a state of the art cooling system that uses evaporative cooling technology, more efficient than traditional refrigeration, Blue Chip has greatly reduced electricity consumption for all the IT equipment and Servers.

“Electricity pricing and availability is volatile. The European Code of Conduct for Data Centres is currently advisory but we do not know if the principles contained in this may become mandatory” said Brian “The energy consumed in cooling data centres is more than just a financial issue, with a saving of around £100,000 per year, these costs can be passed on to our clients”.  

Blue Chip’s bank of state-of-the art servers requires a secure and consistent supply of air at the correct temperature to work at their most efficient and reliable. The Eco Cooling evaporative cooling system is designed to create totally compliant conditions at less than a tenth of the cost of the best available refrigeration system.

Blue Chip customers will receive the very highest levels of security, reliability and redundancy, and with two completely independent infrastructures including communications, power and cooling at the lowest carbon impact, the facilities enable the most cost effective IT service solutions in the UK

Partnering with Marston Vale Trust, managers of the Forest of Marston Vale, they will fully offset the company’s carbon impact by backing the planting of up 750,000 trees.

Blue Chip customers are both large and small and include companies from all verticals.

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Blue Chip is an established IT Services and support company providing specialist IT support services for IBM Midrange users. Blue Chip has grown organically since 1987 to become the largest independent IBM Midrange specialist in the UK. Blue Chip's customers are many and varied and include major banking institutions, finance houses, insurance companies, local authorities, education, manufacturing companies and high street retail chains. As the largest employer of IBM System i & System p technical staff in the UK outside of IBM themselves, Blue Chip has the skills and technical know how to the benefit their many varied clients.