Digital Realty and Schneider Electric Establish New Digital Gateway for Southern Europe

Launched earlier as the first carrier-neutral facility on the island, HER1 plays a critical role in reducing Southern Europe’s digital connectivity and infrastructure gap by enabling the interconnection of international, regional and local subsea cables, empowering cloud, telco, and content delivery networks (CDNs) to better serve the surrounding regions.

Working in tandem with fast-growing markets including Athens, Barcelona, Marseille, Rome, and Tel Aviv, HER1 forms a central part of Digital Realty’s Mediterranean data center platform and takes a major step towards establishing Greece as a strategic connectivity hub for Southern and Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Following a successful prefabricated data center deployment at its Marseille 2 (MRS2) facility, Digital Realty leveraged a turnkey, Tier III solution from Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Modular Data Center portfolio to overcome a host of challenges at HER1. They included requirements for accelerated speed-to-market with a target to become operational within twelve months, increased levels of energy efficiency, and off-site production, testing, and delivery due to HER1’s remote location in Crete.

To achieve this, Schneider Electric provided a purpose-built solution including two, fully integrated, prefabricated power modules containing MV, transformers, LV, UPS equipment and air-cooling systems. Additionally, it deployed two, large-scale, all-in-one Data Halls, complete with power, cooling and IT, utilizing Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure monitoring solution for buildings management and electrical power management systems (EPMS).

Further, Schneider Electric provided the compete spectrum of data center design, build and consultancy services, including all mechanical, electrical (M&E) and software equipment, production, assembly, commissioning and security services. This enabled Digital Realty’s HER1 facility to meet its demanding deployment timeframes, while minimizing the risk of failures during its on-site installation.

A new gateway for southern Europe
According to Telegeography, international bandwidth in southern Europe has seen over 30% compound annual growth since 2016, representing an 6X increase in transmission capacity to the region.

Due to its geographical location and the ongoing investments in submarine networks such as 2Africa, Andromeda, East to Med Corridor (EMC), Medusa, and Thetis, many organizations are selecting Crete as a strategic destination for cable termination and data center deployments - transforming the region into a global interconnection hub that brings multiple continents together.

HER1, Digital Realty’s first carrier-neutral data center in Crete, is located next to the landing point of several of these subsea cable systems and will offer a highly resilient data center capacity to the cloud, subsea cable and connectivity communities.

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