Giancarlo Giacomello, Head of Data Centre Offering for Aruba S.p.A, tells us why the company has opened a new campus in Rome and describes how it will help Aruba meet evolving customer needs.
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Please introduce yourself and tell us about your role at Aruba.
My name is Giancarlo Giacomello, and I am the Head of Data Centre Offering for Aruba S.p.A, Italy’s leading data centre and cloud services provider. I joined Aruba in 2017 and have since managed colocation projects, ensuring customer needs are met. In my current role, I lead the colocation business line and oversee a team focused on planning and delivering tailored customer solutions. In June 2023, I was elected as member of the Board of directors in the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP), an initiative aiming to make European data centres climate neutral by 2030.
Aruba recently inaugurated a new data centre campus in Rome. What drove Aruba to open a campus in Rome?
Despite Rome being Italy’s Capital, it still has limited data centre infrastructures. On the other hand, Milan is increasingly crowded, so it is useful to consider different strategical areas to create new infrastructure. Choosing Rome as the location for Aruba’s latest campus was an opportunity to accelerate the development of the cloud and colocation offerings in that area, and also balance out the importance of Milan by making the Capital a strategic point in Central Italy, bringing to Rome a type and scale of new generation Data Center that was not yet available there
Rome is also well-placed to become a global connectivity hub: while the new campus will help improve the delivery of critical services across Central and South Italy, including to large public administrations and government agencies, it will also significantly improve connections between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
We’re accelerating this process by establishing several Points of Presence at the campus. In July 2024, for example, Sparkle – the first international service provider in Italy and among the top global operators – activated its new Point of Presence at the Hyper Cloud Data Centre. Thanks to connections with Sparkle’s new BlueMed cable, created to increase connectivity throughout the Mediterranean, we’re reinforcing Italy’s Capital’s role as a strategic global connectivity hub. Additionally, the campus now hosts Points of Presence for Namex and MIX, further enhancing its role as a critical interconnection hub by providing high-performance, low-latency access to over 240 networks via Namex and more than 400 AS through MIX.
What features does the campus have that are helping Aruba meet evolving customer needs in the long term?
To enable business growth, businesses require stable, resilient IT infrastructures that constantly deliver and deploy everyday workloads at scale. If the system fails to do so, companies risk being faced with critical operational issues like downtime, which can lead to loss of productivity, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Because of this, customers generally express a need for flexible and scalable colocation solutions. We’ve designed our data centres to meet these demands with customised colocation solutions ranging from rack portions to entire rooms up to private cages and cross-connections. Customers can, therefore, gain the flexibility to scale IT resources up or down when necessary. Not only does this allow them to adjust their infrastructure as needs evolve, but it also plays a crucial role in supporting new applications, expanding cloud adoption, and accommodating data growth and digital transformation. We have built an history of colocation projects in the last five years, tailored around even the most extreme customers’ requirements, choosing the best-in-class solutions to be able to provide the best colocation services the industry has to offer.
Our infrastructure is also built with resilience in mind. We want to ensure our customers receive continuous and reliable service, meeting international standards. The first data centre on our Rome campus, therefore, recently obtained the ANSI/TIA-942-C Rating 4 Constructed Facility certification. After rigorous checks by the EPI, a leading global data centre training provider, this certification confirms adherence to the standard’s requirements for design, planning, and construction and guarantees the continuity of services, long-term resilience, and future-proofed technologies for our customers.
How does this campus differ in terms of sustainability and energy efficiency?
Aruba is committed to continuously improving the sustainability of its data centres, and the Rome campus is no exception. As one of the first signatories of the CNDCP that completed their audit necessary to demonstrate the adherence to the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact Self-Regulatory Initiative (SRI) we met the SRI’s 1st July deadline last year, confirming we are on track to meet the 2030 target. This included demonstrating our infrastructure is meeting measurable targets for 2025 and 2030 in areas such as energy efficiency, water conservation, circular economy, circular energy usage and the prioritization of using energy produced from renewable sources to power up the company’s Data Centres.
We also follow a green-by-design approach to all infrastructures designed and managed by Aruba. This means that energy efficiency is considered at all stages of the planning and building processes. Our Rome campus, therefore, was designed and built to ensure maximum energy efficiency across all aspects of the infrastructure. The presence of photovoltaic systems means the campus can produce itself clean energy. Along with the progress made by other signatories of the CNDCP, this approach to designing and building infrastructure in key to meeting the 2030 goal of climate neutrality for data centres.
With technology such as AI driving innovation in data centre cooling techniques, how is Aruba keeping up?
In recent years, we’ve focused on developing and implementing forward-thinking cooling solutions. While demand from clients for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities is increasing, these applications are extremely resource-intensive, and we foresee them requiring high-density processing environments in the future. To prepare for this anticipated demand, we’ve taken the proactive step of deploying an initial set of liquid cooled racks at our data centre campus in Ponte San Pietro, Bergamo. This technology enhances our readiness to meet energy-efficient processing demands and is designed to support the latest generation of processors as these needs to evolve.
At this stage, we are among the few Italian operators in the industry with the capacity to offer such advanced solutions, positioning us to be prepared for broader adoption of liquid cooling as client needs grow and the market trends in this direction. This strategic preparation allows us to stay at the forefront of emerging HPC and AI applications.