ATNORTH
“Our partner ecosystem is essential to us ”
MAGNÚS KRISTINSSON CEO , ATNORTH
in the DC space , having an early vision that would eventually see its successes recognised and its potential endorsed by the approaches of investors and partners from all over the business world .
“ Since our inception , we ’ ve basically been focusing on high-density workloads ,” says Kristinsson , “ as well as aiming for low latency requirements , workloads in HPC ( High Performance Computing ), Artificial Intelligence , Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing .” atNorth ’ s uniqueness doesn ’ t arise from one particular USP ( Unique Selling Point ) like many other DCs - or even companies in general , for that matter .
“ I think that what makes us different from other DC companies rests on a whole set of attributes . One of the most important , of course , is our fundamental sustainability focus . All our DCs are built out of materials that are as sustainable as possible . We use renewable energy only , and our DCs are designed with energy-efficiency in mind from the outset . On top of this , our market focus is on workloads that need high rack density and use a lot of electricity .
“ One of the main things that sets us apart is that as operators , we are born in IT and don ' t come from real estate , as many DC operators do . That means that flexibility and the creativity to bring a project to fruition is a central part of our thinking . We also understand that time-to-market is key for our customers , so we are strongly solutions-focused . We not only provide housing for computers - as many other DCs do - but we actually build the computer clusters for our clients , and if needed , we operate them as well .” atNorth partly provides traditional column high-density racks , but also low-density , too , with all the required ancillary services and , given their flexible nature , can even do buildto-suit projects on their own campuses . Many of their customers , especially those that are using a lot of electricity for computational workloads , want mixed-tiering , which essentially means mixed-redundancy . They may want lower redundancy for the computational workloads for instance , and higher redundancy for net and storage , and atNorth can , and do provide this service .
On top of all of this , atNorth is able to procure , build and operate the computer clusters that their customers would typically host in their DCs . “ We are highly flexible ,” says Kristinsson , “ and are able to cater solutions for very specific client needs all across the spectrum .”
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