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MEP Awards: Red Engineering wins Innovation

by Gerhard Hope on Dec 13, 2010

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Brian Dryburgh from Red Engineering

Red Engineering won the inaugural Innovation of the Year at the MEP Awards 2010, held last night at the Westin in Dubai.

The consultancy was the unanimous winner for its BladeRoom modular data centre system. The judges commented that “BladeRoom is the future innovation we will all take benefit from, albeit perhaps without realising it! The world is run on data, and this as we know is generally an energy-intensive process, but BladeRoom heralds a greener and far more energy-efficient process.

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Truly the innovation of the year!”

"It is important that companies innovate not just for the sake of innovation, but with tangible results in mind that effect some kind of positive change to the environment, or a solution to an existing problem," said Red Engineering director Brian Dryburgh. "We are a relativelty small company, but with a good design team and a strong focus on innovation."

Key data-centre design problems include the high energy requirement to house and maintain data centre servers, typically as much as that used by the servers themselves. The standard practice is to build much larger facilities than initially required so as to allow for expansion, which have to be paid for and expensively maintained in the interim.

“Our engineers worked as part of a UK/Middle East team designing BladeRoom, a new modular data centre system, to deliver a low-energy, rapid-build solution for all climates. In addition, we created a unique climate emulator, allowing us to measure, rather than calculate, the prototype’s performance,” said Red Engineering in its winning submission.

“Our engineers focused on designing BladeRoom using actual meteorological records for Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. The result is a system which will operate in the Middle East with 98% free cooling, reducing non-server energy use by 89% and water use by 40%.

“The first BladeRoom data centre, which is in the UK, took 22 weeks to build, and can double its capacity in 12 weeks, without prior expansion facilities. It is the most energy-efficient data centre in the world. We are now in talks over the first BladeRoom in the region for which it was designed: the Middle East.

“Our engineers calculated that, if all data centres were as energy-efficient as BladeRoom, the global carbon dioxide emission reduction would be equal to the total annual emissions of the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, which is about 260 million tons,” stated Red Engineering.

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