No data centre customer is quite the same. Data storage needs vary between individual companies, individual locations - and particularly individual industries.
Healthcare is one industry with a specific set of needs for data management. Everybody on the planet has some kind of medical data that needs to be processed and stored. Telemedicine is a further load factor – which explains why healthcare accounts for an estimated 30% of the world’s data.
Another industry that needs specialist data storage is education. This is not just for student records and remote learning, but for the enormous processing power required to run the statistical models and datasets of researchers, which is now multiplying thanks to AI in higher education. A third use case that can require bespoke solutions is local government bodies, who need to handle large amounts of sensitive data with particularly stiff security requirements.
Given these security needs, on-premises data storage has dominated in the past, and continues to enjoy popularity in higher education and medicine. However, not every organisation can run its own facilities. Just like any other business, public organisations need to manage cost, security, and ease of access and performance.
So when three such organisations needed to upgrade their data infrastructure, a ‘micro co-location’ between them made a lot of sense – and the Datacentre Mutualisé Lorrain was the result. A joint venture launched in February 2024 between the Nancy Regional University Hospital (CHRU de Nancy), the University of Lorraine, and the Grand Nancy Regional Administration, the DCML is a great example of how to collaborate to meet data infrastructure needs. Here is how the project happened.
In 2016, both CHRU and the University of Lorraine were facing the obsolescence of their existing data infrastructure. CHRU ran its own on-premises data centre, while the University had chosen two decades prior to share its infrastructure with the Grand Nancy Regional Administration, the region’s local government. With these solutions needing a refresh to meet spiralling data consumption, the three organisations were all searching for a solution to ensure future users could get the performance they needed.
At some stage, the idea of a joint project came to the minds of CHRY, who approached the University of Lorraine in 2016 and proposed a data centre sharing project between the three. A working group looked at the feasibility of a combined facility, liked what they saw, and in June 2019 the three partners signed an agreement to get building.
In common with some other data centres featured in Capacity, DCML is based in a location with architectural heritage. The facility is hosted in the Apollo building at the university designed by French architect Jean Nouvel – who counts world-famous buildings like the Abu Dhabi Louvre and the Paris Philharmonie in his portfolio.
Inside the building, DCML meets Tier 3 standards with a potential 1.3MW capacity, 115 racks at opening, and 1,600 sqm of surface area of which 700 sqm is IT space. Processing power is split between the tenants. One shared area is for the University of Lorraine’s data storage and distance learning platforms and the Grand Nancy Regional Administration’s data, and a separate area is dedicated to hosting CHRU de Nancy’s sensitive medical data. Finance came from a range of sources. The European Union provided around half of the project’s €8m budget, with the rest put up by the three organisations.
On the sustainability side, free cooling was used for the racks and building, hot and cold zones were designated inside the building, and waste heat is sent to the Greater Nancy district heating system. This has helped achieve a 20% reduction in energy use compared to the previous facilities.
This kind of collaboration in the data centre space is not unusual in France, especially in western France where Nancy is located. In 2018, five universities - Université de Lorraine (UL), Université de Haute Alsace (UHA), Université de technologies de Troyes (UTT), Université de Reims Champagne Ardenne (URCA) and the Université de Strasbourg (Unistra) - joined forces to develop a combined data infrastructure called the Grand-Est Data Centre Alliance. This was motivated by similar reasons for the DML project, namely centralising data storage, archiving and processing capacity.
After a rapid construction process that only began in April 2023, the DCML facility opened in February 2024 to the excitement of its occupants. “Patient files are digitised these days, and this represents a considerable gain for healthcare. Storage and interchange of data between healthcare providers requires a high level of security. The grouping of research and anonymised clinical data allows aggregated data to be created and for it to be made use of via AI algorithms,” said CHRU de Nancy’s General Director, Arnaud Vanneste. "This new data centre, as well as meeting the need for larger and larger processing power, is a real success in terms of shared data hosting infrastructure," added Hélène Boulanger, President of the University of Lorraine.
And on the regional government side, the gains are clear, according to the Mayor of Nancy Mathieu Klein: “The technologies used in DCML allow at least a 20% reduction in energy consumption compared to the existing facility and will let heat be reused for district heating.”
Inauguration images via Direction de la communication de l’Université de Lorraine
