Orange has begun construction on its new Normandie 2 data centre at the Val-de-Reuil campus (18 hectares), which is also home to another data centre opened in 2012. The new site will be completed in 2020.
The foundation stone ceremony was attended by Stéphane Richard, Chairman and CEO of the Orange Group, Marc-Antoine Jamet, Mayor of Val-de-Reuil, Françoise Guégot, Vice-President of the Normandy Regional Council, Stéphanie Auger, Vice-President of the Eure Departmental Council and Bernard Leroy, President of the Seine-Eure Metropolitan Community.
The Normandie 2 building will cover 16,000 m², including 5,000m² of computer rooms. It will host Orange business and residential customer data and services, as well as an in-house information system. Orange has invested over €100 million to build these two data centres.
A second ‘green’ data centre
Like the first Orange data centre in Val-de-Reuil, Normandie 2 will be an eco-efficient, resilient and highly secure data centre to respond to growing requirements in terms of data hosting.
The Normandy region was chosen once again to host a data centre as it offers various benefits including ideal weather conditions for the use of ‘free cooling’, a technology to optimise data centre energy consumption.
It uses ambient fresh air to cool IT equipment for eleven out of twelve months, reducing the use of artificial air conditioning by over 80% across the year.
Orange believes that the savings made at the Normandie 1 site by using this technology correspond to the annual domestic electricity consumption of a city with approximately 30,000 inhabitants.
The ISO 140001 and ISO 50001 certified data centre reflects Orange’s efforts to reduce its environmental impact in line with its Corporate Social Responsibility initiative.
The growth in data traffic on networks and in the coming years make these powerful data centres a forward-looking project for Orange and its customers.
