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

Schneider Electric, the global leader in energy management and automation, has partnered with Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR), the largest global provider of cloud and carrier-neutral data center, colocation and interconnection solutions, to deliver its new HER1 Data Center in Heraklion, Crete.

Launched earlier this week 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 EcoStruxureä 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,