Digital Edge’s Manila data center wins prestigious regional award for energy efficiency innovation

Digital Edge (Singapore) Holdings Pte. Ltd. (“Digital Edge”) has announced that its NARRA1 data center in Manila, which opened in early 2023, has won an award for Innovation in Energy Efficiency, Southeast Asia, at the recent W.Media Asia Pacific Cloud & Data Center Awards. The award recognizes the company’s efforts to pioneer groundbreaking cooling technology to achieve market leading levels of energy and water efficiency and demonstrates the growing prominence of the Philippines in the region’s digital infrastructure landscape.

NARRA1 honored across Southeast Asia for the deployment of groundbreaking cooling technology

One of the challenges of building data centers in the Philippines is its hot and humid climate, which makes cooling a key operational issue and has a significant impact on the overall energy efficiency of a facility. To address this challenge, in 2023 Digital Edge become the first commercial colocation operator to deploy Nortek’s innovative StatePoint liquid cooling technology in Asia; StatePoint uses a proprietary liquid to air membrane energy exchanger technology that enables evaporative cooling and allows for higher cooling density and flexibility in cooling system design.

The use of this technology, alongside NARRA1’s efficient engineering design, enabled the data center to achieve a market leading annualized design Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.193. In addition, during the initial Phase 1 testing conducted in early 2023, the facility exceeded expectations achieving a PUE of 1.15 at 75% load under optimized conditions. The company estimates the technology has, at the lowest estimate, enabled it to achieve annual electricity and water savings of approximately 11% and 33% respectively, with the latter equivalent to 30 Olympic size swimming pools of water saved every year.

Vic Barrios, Country Manager for Digital Edge in the Philippines commented, “We are delighted to receive this recognition less than one year since we opened our facility, marking the first award for NARRA1. The use of the StatePoint Liquid cooling technology has enabled us to achieve what we believe to be one of the most energy efficient data centers in Southeast Asia, and we are proud that our facility is helping to position the Philippines at the forefront of data center innovation in the region.”

Raymond Rufino, Principal for Investments and Real Estate of the Threadborne Group, Digital Edge’s joint partner on the NARRA1 project, added, “Data centers consume between 20 to 50 times the energy of a typical office building so it’s critical we make every watt of energy count. Since the outset of this project we have worked to build one of the most advanced and sustainable facilities in the market. We have proven that a PUE of less than 1.2 is possible despite the challenges of a tropical climate and are honored that our NARRA1 facility is setting new standards for the industry to aspire to, both in the Philippines and beyond.”

With 2,200 cabinets and 10MW of IT power, NARRA1 is the largest carrier neutral data center in operation in the Philippines, designed to meet the latest demands from cloud, network and enterprise customers, including high power density deployment such as AI. Since launch in March 2023 the company has already signed a number of key customers for the facility, including major domestic internet service providers. Digital Edge is also deploying the StatePoint liquid cooling technology at its new EDGE2 data center in Jakarta that will be Ready-for-Service in Q1 2024.