LuxConnect Data Center in Luxembourg Nears Launch

Luxembourg data center provider LuxConnect is putting the final touches on its fourth data center in the country.

The data center is designed for high resiliency and will use clean energy sourced in Norway. The provider has a Tier IV design certification for the facility from the Uptime Institute, and said it plans to also go through the process for certifying the constructed facility.

It is easier to buy renewable electricity at the large scale that data centers need in northern Europe than it is in other parts of the world, including the US. Renewable energy is abundant in the region, and relatively accessible because of deregulated energy markets there, and because electrical grids across multiple northern European countries are interconnected.

For customers in the US, buying energy even across state lines is often very complicated because of the way energy regulation is structured.

Tier IV is the highest data center infrastructure reliability level recognized by Uptime. In addition to the new facility in Bettembourg, LuxConnect has Tier IV design certification for two older data centers. The newest data center, as well as one other older one in Bissen, also have Tier II design certification.

None of LuxConnect’s existing data centers have a Tier certification for constructed facility. This is an important distinction, since many data center providers get design certification but not the constructed facility certification, which means they haven’t had Uptime verify that the data center was actually built to the design that was certified.

The design v. constructed facility certification issue is a thorny one, some data center operators claiming that the practice of getting the former without following through with the latter amounts to abuse of the rating system and serves to mislead customers about a data center’s actual reliability level.

The controversy led Uptime to revise the system recently. While design certifications are still available to all data center operators elsewhere around the world, US data center service providers may no longer get them. Last year, Uptime also said operators that received design certifications will lose them if they don’t get constructed facility certifications within two years.

LuxConnect is planning to follow-up with a facility certification for at least its newest facility. “Uptime Institute will do the review on the tests we have done together, and we are hoping to be granted full certification by the time the site opens later this summer,” LuxConnect CEO Roger Lampach said in a statement.

The data center will have two redundant 10 MVA electrical feeds. Half of it has been fully built out (the half that’s designed to Tier IV standards), and half consists of shell space for custom designs for potential clients. It will have about 60,000 square feet of data center space, according to the LuxConnect website.