Floppy to Fibre: 20 Years of Irish Data Leadership, Host In Ireland

Host in Ireland recently released its Quarterly Report on the state of the Irish data centre market for Q4 2019. The market is sustaining growth at 3% with 658MW of operational data centres. Hyperscalers remain the dominant data centre type, with 73% of capacity, and the colocation wholesale market has doubled from 6% to 12% in the past 3 years. The report also looked at data centres as a proportion of total carbon outputs and it now stands at 1.7% of Ireland’s carbon emissions in 2019. This is a very interesting figure as it is actually likely to be less once the directly procured renewable energy is factored in.

Host In Ireland update

Taking into the account the fact the tech giants – Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon – were the world’s biggest buyers of renewable electricity in 2019, sustainability is going to continue to be a dominant story for data centres. For Ireland to maintain its leading status as a Tier 1 data hosting location over the next decade, the continued decarbonisation of the grid as set out by the Government, Eirgrid and IWEA will play a critical role.

Wind farms have recently recorded max wind output of 4,137MW and set new daily generation records of 71% of electricity needs met by wind. These numbers are encouraging indicators that the 70% annualised target by 2030 set by the government for renewable energy source is achievable.

While preparing for the future, we would be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to look back and acknowledge a unique milestone that set the stage for the Irish market today. In March 2000, Ireland was announced as the largest software exporter in the world by the Organisation for Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD).

The preceding decades saw Dublin become a centre of excellence as a global hub for software localisation. Technologies were trialled, standards defined, milestones achieved and the expertise of the Irish workforce was second to none.

As the market transitioned from floppy disks to fibre over the next two decades, the strength of that foundation laid the groundwork for the data centre market we see in 2020. Today, Ireland has the largest cluster of data centres in Europe. The critical infrastructure found in the Metro Dublin Area acts as a foundation for Foreign Direct Investment in the ICT industry in Ireland. It is by far our largest service export at €86 billion per year and underwrites almost 115,000 ICT jobs in Ireland.

Ireland’s role as a centre of excellence for all things data, both data resting here and the exporting of the design, build and operation of the centres themselves, carries forward the legacy of our ICT history and pedigree. Whilst the challenges will be different over the next twenty years, a foundation of brave, creative and relentless success has been set and we look forward to what’s to come next.

By Garry Connolly who is the President and Founder of Host in Ireland, a strategic global initiative created to increase awareness of the benefits of hosting digital assets in Ireland, and winner of the Datacloud Europe 2016 award for Innovative Data Center Location. He is also Co-chair of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Awareness Coalition, a not-for-profit initiative designed to raise awareness of the data privacy obligations for companies resulting from the implementation of the GDPR. A much sought-after keynote speaker, panelist and moderator at global industry events, Garry regularly appears in conferences throughout the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dublin, London, Monaco and Costa Rica.

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