Automated Transcript
Chris Smith, Gamma ESG Programme Manager: Good morning, welcome to Gamma Sustainability Podcast. I’m Chris Smith, Gamma ESG Programme Manager. I’m here today with Hal Gul, our Engineering Director, and Mark Worden, our Head of Data Centre Infrastructure. Gamma’s got a long-standing commitment to sustainability. We’ve run a carbon neutral network since 2006, and in 2021 we set our targets to become a carbon net zero business, and early last year those targets were verified by the SBTI, which is an achievement we’re really proud of. Along with those commitments comes a lot of activity, and running a data centre, as I’m sure everyone is aware, is a high-energy, high-electricity-consuming activity. So, we’re here today to talk about all the activity that is going on in our data centre to reduce our consumption and get us on our journey to net zero. So, Mark, just coming to you, at what point did you start to become aware of the need to start to proactively manage energy consumption in our data centre? We’ve got presence in multiple data centres, one of them we host our own, which is where you’re predominantly based. So, we’ll talk about what opportunities we’ve got elsewhere. Shall we? I’m keen to understand what we’ve done in our own data centre first of all.
Mark: Yeah, so what we’ve done in our own data centre is—so when the ESOS guys came in to do the survey, they sort of recommended upgrading our air conditioning units, possibly generators as well, and changing the room design. So originally, we had air conditioning units that cooled the whole rooms. We’ve got five rooms at our data centre and we took the advice on to use cold aisle containment. So, we emptied one of the rooms, installed the new cold aisle containment, which worked really well, really. We installed some new stalls units, CRAC units, and room one was the first room that we did, and from there we just moved from room to room to room. So, we’ve got like three of the four rooms now with old aisle containment. One of them’s closed down and one of them is a historic transmission room which doesn’t really consume as much energy, if you will, as the other server rooms.
Chris: So, with that, there is—we’ve got a couple of other initiatives as well, haven’t we? I think there’s trying to rationalise the network somewhat, aren’t we? Which links into what are we doing elsewhere? What are we looking at?
Hal: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the opportunities through the work Mark carried out was an opportunity—as we were evolving the network and developing our network strategy—there was an opportunity to vastly reduce the size of network footprint we had. We went from about 40 PoP sites down to 20, and that was a reduction in terms of removing a lot of legacy from the network. But also, as we evolved our technology into modern soft switch environments within our data centres, it just gave us the opportunity to not only reduce, but also then invest in modern technology which then lent itself to the development of the new data centre designs that we took from the surveys and feedback. Yeah, so the two kind of dovetailed together in terms of the opportunity to do both. Bearing in mind the data centre Mark’s been talking to—that’s the only data centre Gamma own and operate. The rest of our data centres across the UK are from third parties that we’ve been working with.
Chris: In terms of designing your network strategy and the approach to buying new infrastructure and evolving the network. How much is energy consumption and Gamma’s broader sustainability ambitions factoring into those decisions?
Hal: Absolutely. So, I think with any technology evolution, there’s opportunity for reduction in size, power consumption, which then leads to smaller devices doing a lot more capability, which ultimately drives down the amount of rack space, the amount of power you need to consume. So that’s always been a factor just purely from an efficiency point of view from a technology throughput point of view and starts leading quite well into your kind of gigabit throughput per kilowatt hour approach. So, it’s really been driven by our requirements from a technology point of view, but also working with the right vendors to give us the right capability from a technology point of view, but also be mindful of the cost and the power consumption of those devices. And they typically go two- to three-year cycles of technology evolution. So, we’ve consistently over the years, since our net zero ambition started, consistently looked at our technology and replaced sensibly where we felt there’s a need to do that both from a technology point of view and also from a sustainability point of view.
Chris: Yeah, so you touch interestingly—you touch on there that we’re going through, what did you say, three-year cycles of technology upgrades and updates? That is going to lead to a fairly significant amount of what we call legacy hardware, I guess, that is coming out of the network. So, what have we got in place that allows us to deal responsibly with those bits of hardware that we’re taking out?
Hal: There’s two aspects. I’ll let Mark touch on how we recycle our equipment. I think from my own point of view, whenever I’ve looked at it from a network strategy and a technology evolution point of view, it’s always been based on: do we need to replace it first of all? Is it something we can run for as long as we need to without the risk to service or security? But as and when we’ve had to replace things, then Mark and the team—I’ll let Mark explain how we recycle equipment.
Mark: Yeah, so as I said before, we managed to empty data rooms from the old equipment to the new, which is—we managed to keep moving. And as I said, the equipment’s getting smaller and less powerful. So, when we sort of remove the old equipment, we tend to get third parties in we’ve worked with over the years—companies like Lynx or DTC Telecom—that come in, evaluate it. They’ll look at the equipment and say, “Yeah, we can repurpose that.” So, whether it’s they take it out, reconfigure it, repurpose it, spruce it up if you will, and then they sell it on to other sort of telecom providers around the world. For like, you know, they might go to Africa or somewhere else where the technology is not quite as up to date as we’ve got in the UK for Gamma. So, we’ve used them over the years—removing the old Transmode TS1000 from the 40 PoP sites that we mentioned before to the Nortel equipment that we have in. If you will, one data room was full of just this Nortel kit. And obviously the new technology in the cold aisle—it’s probably six racks. So that’s the kind of difference that we’re seeing, is that the new technology can be whole-room powered with just six racks. Same with the national network as well that we’ve got—the transmission network. So again, we needed 40 sites because the technology at the time could only go 40 km, 50 km till it needed powering up again, re-amping to the amplified sites. Now it can go up 90 kilometres. So, Gamma again invested in that, 2017ish, something like that. So again, we removed all them 40 PoP sites that had air conditioning, they had fire suppression systems in, alarm systems in—all needed servicing by our suppliers, if you will. Again, needed maintaining. The sites needed maintaining by Gamma employees. So, we had to visit each site two, three, four times a year to keep them running. Now we’ve reduced from 40 to 20, and those 20 are kind of with third parties in their exchanges or their data centres. So, we’ve gone from having six racks in these hub cabins to one rack in a data centre or exchange around the country. So again, massively reducing the footprint.
Chris: Yeah, efficiency. I guess you’re reducing business travel with that as well, aren’t you? The fewer sites that you have to visit, hopefully infrequent visits, increased reliability of the new technology.
Mark: Yeah, because like I say, the third-party providers—they maintain it all. It’s all part of the cost. They just maintain everything and keep it up to standards.
Chris: So, I guess it’s really important to note here that what we’re not doing—and Hal, you might be able to comment on this—is we’re not just looking to outsource our data centre capability. We are looking—because we run enterprise-grade services, so we’ve got some really significant numbers, if you like, in terms of minutes of traffic across the UK business, a network that runs across our infrastructure—we’re not just looking to pass our footprint on to others. We’re looking to run the most efficient, most reliable network, and that goes hand in hand with sustainability because it means reduction in the footprint, reduction in carbon.
Hal: Absolutely. We’re part of critical network infrastructure in the UK. We carry approximately 25% of the UK business traffic through the Gamma network, and what we really want to focus on is—the data centres are absolutely key to us. We want to retain and maintain service of those sites that carry over national fibre network for reamplification, because we don’t need to run and operate them. They can be part of third-party solutions, which absolutely work well for us. And as we look ahead over the next two to three years, we want to continue that evolution of technology. We’ve built our own private cloud and virtualised environment to reduce a lot of our on premise server technology, and I see that evolving further as we build new partnerships. It’s how we start leveraging some aspects of those services into the public cloud. I think what’s really close to my heart is we provide, as you said, services to many enterprise customers in the UK, and it’s making sure the technology could deliver the quality service we’re renowned for in the UK. Make sure it meets our reliability and quality metrics that we measure ourselves on, and as those technologies evolve and allow us to achieve that, then that will give us the opportunity to actually evolve our network further and even reduce further our footprint within our data centres.
Chris: And that’s great. Because I mean, everything that we’re talking about there is running high-grade, high-quality networks—no compromise to service—which obviously we’re really proud of, the quality of service that we offer here. But actually, fully integrating sustainability into your planning is not compromising that notion at all and continues to allow you to do what you do best, which is running our network to the level that we do.
Hal: Absolutely. Absolutely, it’s key to us. And I think as we’ve evolved over the last five or ten years, if you look at the amount of equipment we reduced in the network, the amount of time we’re spending on the road coming out to these sites, all of these contribute to our sustainability goals. So, whether it’s running electricity in a data centre versus an engineer in a car, these are all small incremental things that we’ve done over time, which make a massive impact over time. And if you actually truly measure that over the real-time frame, it’d be quite significant. So, I think there’s a number of things coming together which just naturally play into that. And I think as an organisation, because we’ve been running carbon net zero for some years, it is embedded into our kind of thinking in everything we do. And the great work the sustainability team and yourself have been doing over the last few years in terms of promoting that internally. And I think naturally as individuals, what we see happening around the world—you become sensitised to it anyway because so many events across the world are now due to climate change, which is all triggered on the back of the amount of carbon footprint that people are burning, fossil fuels people are burning. So, I think as a generation now, people coming into the business and young engineers joining the company—it’s a question we get regularly asked: what are we doing in terms of our impact to the environment? Quite interesting about our sustainability initiative, which is really an eye opener because it’s becoming real rather than a target that we’re setting in time, which is a good thing to do.
Chris: That sounds like another good podcast—to be talking to those engineers there.
Hal: Absolutely, absolutely.
Chris: I’ll tap you up about that afterwards. I just want to touch on another point, so draw it back to something that was mentioned earlier on. So, we’re talking about running the most energy efficient network that we can. We can’t make a big jump from one to the other—it has to be a transition. But as we transition, we’re pulling hardware out of the network. And Mark, you were talking about it—it might have been you actually, Hal, who was saying that we run the kit that we’ve got for as long as possible. And that’s really important because we need to be acknowledging the fact that there is a lot of emissions within the actual process of manufacturing network equipment. It’s huge—the statistics are crazy, in fact. So, it’s important that we run those for as long as possible. Mark, you mentioned earlier about what we do when we recycle. So, we run them, get primary use out of them as long as we can. We’ll then repurpose them or sell them for other companies or even other nations to be able to use the equipment for as long as they possibly can. So, getting every minute of life, if you like, that we possibly can out before it goes into a responsible recycling scheme. Have we got responsible recycling partners where we can’t make that extended use of life happen? Have we got those partners in place that can come and recycle our equipment for us?
Mark: Yeah, we’ve got like a “WEEE cage,” if you will, where any old equipment that can’t be repurposed or sold on, if you will, goes in the WEEE cage. And again, we’ve got a partner, if you will, that comes and takes the old stuff away. And we talked about KT, but a lot of our WEEE really is a lot of IT stuff—routers, etc., etc. That tends to fill up our WEEE cage more so than the network kit, if you will, with the operations kit. Because I’d say the majority of that does get repurposed or sold on, if you will. So, it’s mainly the IT kit that does go into the cage. And as I say, someone comes in and takes it away.
Chris: And that’s a responsible recycling partner, WEEE regulation? Because that’s it, isn’t it? We’re doing everything we can to get the full use out of the equipment. And we’re not just sort of being irresponsible, sending it to—we are.
Mark: Yeah, we are.
Chris: Brilliant. Couple more questions. Do you enjoy this part—incorporating sustainability into your daily jobs? Has it brought about sort of a different perspective than what you guys do day in, day out?
Hal: Absolutely. Very close to my heart in terms of, you know, I mentioned earlier about the general environment and the climate change we’re seeing—it has a massive impact. I think we all have a role, responsibility in doing that. I think it’s great again that we have the opportunity to drive that and there is a clear set of goals that we’re setting out to do. And the part me and my team play in terms of making sure we can achieve that. And we’re doing everything we can to achieve our sustainability goals and driving our technology partners as hard as we can to make sure that things don’t just come out of life really quickly. How can we extend the life of them? What service will we be consuming so we can ensure we can get the most out of that equipment—but not to compromise our service quality and reliability.
Chris: And Mark, are all your team engaged in this?
Mark: Yeah, it’s not just, like I say, my team—as mentioned engineers or even office staff coming in to our data centre. Have we got a recycling bin? Have we got a cardboard bin? Have we got this? Little things, like you say. But yeah, the answer is always yes, yes, yes. And if we haven’t, we’ll look into it. And we never really get it, but even like I said, we’ve got little battery bins that get recycled responsibly. It’s just your AA batteries or, you know, there’s a cardboard bin and stuff. I mean, we even got an email this morning asking about recycling—“Where’s the recycle bin?”—pointed from an engineer that’s just started working there. So, as Hal said, it’s key really to everything. It’s sort of the new, young engineers coming in. It’s number one, number two on the sort of priority, you know. It’s amazing, as you say.
Chris: And is there anything going on that me as the ESG Programme Manager, poking all over the business, asking the different questions—and not just you guys, other functions as well—is there anything going on that I don’t know about in terms of recycling or sustainability in the data centre?
Hal: I think it’s probably more linked to longer-term strategy. It reminds us of how we’re going to evolve our network forward. And as we start to get the balance right between running our own infrastructure versus partnering with the right public cloud provider, I think that’s going to give us a lot more leverage in terms of reducing our footprint. Because I think some of the technology capabilities that are going to be available to us in the future will reduce the amount of equipment we actually need. And there is a transition period where, as we run dual, there will be an increase in costs. But again, it’s working with the suppliers—both our data centre providers, our power providers—to make sure they’re sourcing that energy from sustainable sources. But I think in the strategy, as that plays out over the next two to three years, I think there’s going to be some massive opportunity in terms of scaling our network and growing our network but doing that in a much more sustainable way. So, I think that’s still developing as a strategy, because we need to be convinced that that approach is going to be the right thing for our services and for our customers.
Chris: What I’d like to close on is what we haven’t spoken about—and I purposely kept it until the end—is that Gamma is clearly, through the work that Hal and Mark are doing, clearly making every effort it possibly can to reduce our footprint, to maximise our energy efficiency. But underpinning all of this is the fact that we power our data centre with renewable electricity. So, we can confidently say that we’re zero emissions in the eyes of some of our disclosures—certainly the SBTI are comfortable with that approach. But we want to go one step further. We want to reduce our consumption as much as possible because we recognise that the faster the UK and the world can get to renewable energy, renewable electricity, the quicker we all start to achieve our net zero ambitions. And we’ve talked today about sustainability being integrated into the planning and the strategy for our network, and that’s something that Gamma can be really proud of. But it’s nice to hear that we’re going, we’re taking further steps than that. And it’s also great to hear that we’ve got different people from different walks of life coming into Gamma and challenging us on our sustainability credentials, and we’re responding to those. So, Hal, Mark—thank you very much for your time today.
Hal: Thank you.
Mark: Thank you.
Chris: And we’ll see you guys on the next sustainability podcast.
