Engineering & Works

France Datacenter is an association that brings together all the players in the French data centre ecosystem: architects, contractors, specialist consulting firms, suppliers, constructors, owners, operators, etc. It represents the sector and promotes it as the bedrock of the digital economy’s performance and reliability. The association currently numbers around a hundred companies involved in the design, construction and operation of data centres.

VINCI Facilities Data Center & Télécom, Axians Networks Paris, CBI (subsidiary of VINCI Construction France) and several Building Solutions companies (TUNZINI Process, Santerne IDF Tertiaire) are association members.

VINCI Facilities Data Center & Télécom, which handles €20 million worth of multi‑technical maintenance, has taken an even more active role in the association. Benoit Ganousse, its business development manager, is part of the association’s committee. Engineering and business solutions director Aymeric Tissandier also joined the board early in 2019.
This collaboration brings them into close contact with the sector’s main players.

By encouraging greater awareness and educating people, the association also helps defend the sector, which has a poor image in terms of environmental impact. Data centres do have high energy needs and the sector is quite engaged in trying to reduce this energy consumption, by optimising what is known as PUE, or Power Usage Efficiency: the ratio of total power consumed to pure computing power.

Even now, every kilowatt hour consumed to power computer servers often requires another kilowatt hour to cool those servers, giving a PUE of 2. We know that the best-performing data centres have a PUE of 1.2, so it is only right to commit to working on consumption and reducing the dreaded heat, which is lost or dissipated into the environment… (you can also read read the article Unavoidable Energy: what exactly is it?)

These efforts are necessary, but we can also contribute, through our own habits, to reducing energy consumption. It has been estimated that a single Google search or email sent without attachments consumes just under one watt hour. This is equivalent to powering a 60-watt light bulb for one minute. On average, the emails sent by a French user cost the same in energy terms as driving a car 1,000 kilometres, according to the French Environment & Energy Management Agency, ADEME. A quarter of this energy is consumed by the data centres, a third by the communications networks, and the rest by the devices used (smartphone, PC, etc.)

Simply by regularly clearing our inboxes, avoiding “Reply to All” and reducing attachment sizes, we could contribute significantly to reducing the impact of our digital activity.