PeaSoup: The UK’s Only Cloud Provider to Use Liquid Immersion Cooling Technology Has a History of Innovation

“This initiative is not about PeaSoup as a company, marketing hype or promotion. It’s about the future, our children, and generations to come. Unless stopped, humanity’s destruction of nature will ultimately render the planet completely degraded. Climate change with extreme weather events is already occurring more frequently with great intensity. We are also radically approaching critical tipping points. We need to act now and bend the curve of carbon emissions. There is only one pathway forward and that involves making rapid and deep cuts in emissions – including at data centers and across the cloud computing industry that is absolutely fundamental and crucial for how we work and nearly everything we produce.”

– Art Malinowski, Head of Marketing at PeaSoup Hosting Limited

Disruptive by nature, PeaSoup was the first cloud company in Europe to go to market with a fully hyper-converged architecture, one of only five in the world at the time. Based on VMware technology, that foundation is today relied on by a rapidly growing customer base that includes leaders in the automotive, education, government, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail industries that demand the elasticity, utter reliability, and ironclad security of the PeaSoup cloud.

We recently connected with PeaSoup’s Head of Marketing Art Malinowski to learn more about the company’s recently unveiled ECO Cloud Service, its aggressive emissions-related goals, and the growing demand for environmentally friendly IT solutions. We also took the opportunity to learn more about PeaSoup’s deployment of immersive liquid cooling technology at its state-of-the-art data center in Gatwick, U.K.

“We offer a full array of public, private, and hybrid cloud services and solutions, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Backup-as-a-Service, and hyper-converged storage that removes around 40% of the risk of downtime over comparable offerings and increases performance,” says Malinowski. “On the most basic level we provide our customers with everything they need to realize the full potential of a truly virtual, software-defined datacenter that addresses their unique needs – all through an environment that can be controlled by the existing IT team through a full portal interface or with on-premises management tools for VMware environments.”

Malinowski also notes that PeaSoup guides and supports customers at every step of their cloud journey, from planning their cloud infrastructure to data migration and fully managed cloud services. It’s work that he believes is inherently good for the environment.

“Centralizing services into the cloud provides the opportunity to deliver efficiency,” says Malinowski. “Organizations of all sizes can take advantage of the investment in power efficiency and heat reuse that would not be commercially viable on an individual basis.”

That is certainly the case with PeaSoup. In additional to being VMware Zero Carbon Committed, all of the company’s data centers and buildings will be powered by 100% renewable energy by 2025. But that’s just the start. PeaSoup is the only provider in the U.K. to use liquid immersion cooling technology to deliver a carbon-zero cloud – the company’s ECO Cloud service.

PeaSoup embraces environmental friendly immersive cooling for cloud services. This technology increases performance by stabilising ambient CPU temperature and reduces data centre footprint and power consumption by a whopping 30%.

“Our Zero Carbon efforts are very much focused on tangible elements where we can make a real difference and not offer lip service,” adds Malinowski. “As an organization we strive to develop our services with others of a similar mindset to reduce our impact on the environment – not just as an ‘offset,’ but as a true sustainable position where the whole chain of supply can be seen to benefit the environment.”

The liquid immersion technology used in PeaSoup’s data center in Gatwick accomplishes that and cools servers by placing them in a biodegradable dielectric liquid. The cooling can be up 1,000 times more efficient than air conditioning. It’s a process that not only makes all components less susceptible to temperature changes, but also enables them to be placed much closer together – allowing PeaSoup to simultaneously increase the compute and storage capacity the facility delivers. The system also uses very little water.

“Power is one of the most important factors in calculating a carbon footprint and Power Usage Efficiency, or PUE,” he says. “The dielectric biodegradable liquid used to cool our servers stands at a 1.03 score, while the average PUE for data centers that use air conditioning is around the 2.0 mark.”

Despite such impressive gains, Malinowski stresses that PeaSoup has plans for much more. By the end of 2025, and as part of its work with local councils, the company will move to install thermal heating exchanges at the end of its closed-looped circulation system to help heat local and public buildings.

“We offer the high-performance, secure, and utterly reliable cloud services and solutions the most demanding enterprises need for less than the competition, without ingress and egress fees and with personal, dedicated service that delivers peace of mind,” he says. “VMware has long been the backbone of our cloud infrastructure and with the VMware Zero Carbon Committed initiative we can improve our goals and raise awareness about sustainable cloud computing platforms while accelerating the implementation of alternative cooling methods that don’t require carbon offsetting. With our cloud we can help enterprises immediately lower their own carbon footprint.”

Learn more about PeaSoup and its partnership with VMware here.