ECL, a leader in data center as a service, has unveiled the first modular, sustainable, off-grid data center in the world that runs mostly on green hydrogen.
ECL will provide data centers with a 99.9999 percent uptime in 1MW blocks. Additionally, the business disclosed $7M in seed funding that was co-led by Molex Ventures and Hyperwise Ventures. As members of the ECL board of directors, Lily Yeung, vice president at Molex Ventures, and Nathan Shuchami, managing partner at Hyperwise Ventures join ECL founder and CEO Yuval Bachar. The money will help ECL increase its market share and build its first data center at its Mountain View, California, headquarters, with completion expected in the second quarter of 2023.
ECL’s Datacenter-as-a-Service is designed for usage by mid-sized data center operators, which are often major businesses with a mix of cloud and on-premises IT infrastructures.
When calculated over a five-year period, service costs are two-thirds less than the total cost of ownership (TCO) of standard colocation data center providers. The community-integrated data center architecture functions with zero emissions at extremely low noise levels while consuming no local resources, including power or water. Because of ECL’s modular design and independence from local utilities, its data centers can be constructed and built much more quickly than those of competitors, cutting planning and building cycles from 18 to 24 months to 6 to 9 months.
Bachar has held executive positions in engineering, infrastructure, and architecture at Digital Equipment Corporation, Microsoft Azure, LinkedIn, Facebook, Cisco, and Juniper Networks (DEC). He was a founding member of the Open19 project, a data center industry effort to create a new open standard for servers based on a typical form factor, and he served as the foundation’s previous president. In the fields of data center, networking, and system design, he is the holder of eight US patents. He has also received three Cisco Pioneer Awards.
First entirely hydrogen-powered data center in the industry
ECL is the first supplier to deliver a fully-green hydrogen-powered data center, although other data center providers have installed hydrogen fuel cells as backup power supply and with some performing trials of systems anticipated for production delivery in three to five years. Combining various disruptive technologies, such as environmentally friendly hydrogen-based power generation, battery energy storage, and highly dependable power architecture independent of the utility grid, enables this leapfrog breakthrough. This almost completely reduces waste while maximizing efficiency and delivery time.
Given the rising per-server power consumption brought on by accelerated chip and system density, ECL cooling advances offer significantly higher density-per-rack than traditional data center operators. ECL’s server racks are cooled using water produced as a byproduct of hydrogen-based power generation, which eliminates the requirement for external water supplies. In contrast to other colocation data center providers, we achieve lower Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratios by combining this with our own rear door heat exchange technology.
ECL Lightning, an innovative comprehensive data center management system, is used to monitor and manage every aspect of the ECL data center in real time, including power production, power distribution, and rack cooling. Its distinctive and user-friendly user interface (UI) offers thorough, understandable, and straightforward monitoring, enabling precise control over every aspect of running the data center.
