YORK'S frequently bracing air has played a key role in helping a growing internet server and cloud hosting provider dramatically reduce its energy costs and impact on the environment.

Bytemark Hosting, which is aiming to win the Think Green business of the year award, says it invested more than £1.2 million in its own datacentre in York in late 2013, but such centres required an 'incredible' amount of power to operate.

"The thousands of computers (servers) that comprise the datacentre must be powered on 24/7," said spokesman Rajesh Joshi.

"They must also be kept within consistent temperature limits - 18-27 degrees C. This typically requires power-hungry air-conditioning.

"Working with our northern build partner Sudlows and Yorkshire-based Airedale cooling, we decided to create a datacentre that would benefit from its unique location in Yorkshire to cool the servers."

He said datacentre cooling was usually provided by traditional air-conditioning compressors and large global datacentre operators such as Google and Facebook had approached the problem by building datacentres in extreme northern latitudes such as Luleå, Sweden. They naturally benefitted from the icy cold Arctic air to cool servers, meaning air-conditioning was rarely required.

" We identified that York is a surprisingly ideal location for the application of similar technology. Over the last five years, the average temperature in York has been 10 degrees C whilst the average *high* temperature has been just 17 degrees C.

"Using Airedale\'s cooling, our datacentre can be cooled using the fresh Yorkshire air for almost 95 per cent of the year - any time the temperature is below 21.5 degrees C.

"We've been able to enhance the local community by providing jobs in a greener business and reducing the use of air-conditioning compressors which are noisy.

"We hope that achieving global recognition as a small, independent business demonstrates that you don\'t need to be a \"mega\" datacentre provider like Facebook and Google to use innovative technology and lead the way in being green.

"To conclude, our strong consideration of the environment when building the datacentre and subsequent innovative use of fresh air cooling to massively increase the efficiency of our datacentre places us as a strong contender for this award."