Carbon3IT’s National Data Centre Academy

“Everyone needs data centres, and everyone needs to bring down their carbon footprint. Given the power demands data centres often have, these two needs might seem to contradict each other. That is where Carbon3IT comes in. Carbon3IT is a sustainable IT Consultancy working to assist companies in reducing the financial and environmental costs of using IT in business. The most valuable tool in pursuing both of these goals is knowledge, and that is why Carbon3IT has established a the NDCA (National Data Centre Academy).

The NDCA is a multi-purpose facility designed to provide practical training in real data centre and server room environments. It does this alongside providing a passive and active showcase for new and innovative products, services and research facilities.

“We aim to be an independent source of truth for the data centre sector,” says John Booth, Managing Director and Principal Consultant at Carbon3IT.

This combination of training facilities and showcases is vital to addressing industry-wide challenges facing the data centre sector.

“The training element is to address the global data centre skills crisis by offering a portfolio of training courses from entry level all the way up to management and leadership courses,” Booth shares. “The passive and active showcases are primarily practical training aids, but they also give companies the opportunity to showcase their products to our training delegates and other visitors to the NDCA.”

For the costs of attending a single trade show, companies can display their product at the NDCA for a whole year, while also having the opportunity to use the NDCA as part of their sales activity. The NDCA itself also benefits from showcasing these products, as it creates opportunities to meet companies that might want to use its training facilities.

The Academy does not just provide facilities for training, but also the kind of real working environment necessary for research programmes from organisations such as Innovate UK.

But more than all of that, the NDCA has been built to address a problem at the core of this still nascent industry.

Just Like the Real Thing

One thing that Booth has observed in his time in the data centre sector is that when you ask people how they came to be part of the industry they will always say they “fell” into it.

“From a technical perspective, this is normally through conventional electrical or mechanical apprentices, such as people who move across from contracting or working for a facility management company and get offered the chance to work in data centres, or IT people working remotely for their companies, or for managed service providers,” Booth tells us.

Meanwhile, for anyone looking to move into the data centre sector, training options are limited to virtual online courses, or conventional training in classrooms.

The NDCA is different and unique, building a real data centre with all the components that a real data centre has, just for training.

“It is similar to an aeroplane simulator, so people can push the boundaries and try and break things,” Booth says. “The ability to do this is very valuable, especially when we are moving into a new era of energy-efficient and sustainable data centres where they will be reusing the waste heat.”

In doing this, the NDCA is targeting four primary groups; graduates and apprenticeships, existing personnel in non-commercial data centres, and IT staff looking after smaller facilities – which Carbon3IT estimates to number in the region of 80,000-100,000 in the UK. It will also offer its training to people working in sectors such as oil and gas, manufacturing, and retail, as well as ex-military personnel.

“The goal is that anyone coming on one of our training courses will get an interview at a colocation or hyperscale facility and we may even be able to facilitate in partnership with recruitment agencies,” says Booth.

Building the Path

Because there is currently no formal route into data centre engineering, NDCA is working with partners to create a data centre engineering apprenticeship scheme that can address the global skills crisis and create a pool of personnel to operate the new generation of energy-efficient, sustainable data centres.

“Data centres are mission critical environments and are now designated by the UK Government as Critical National Infrastructure or CNI,” Booth points out. “While we don’t really know what the associated regulations will look like, we think that professional and ongoing training will be required.”

To that effect, Carbon3IT is working with DSIT and DESNZ, Tech UK TechSkills, The BCS, the Data Centre Alliance and Innovate UK Business Growth on a national basis, as well as locally with the WMCA, Coventry and Warwickshire Growth and Skills Hubs, and through them, the University of Warwick, Coventry University and Warwickshire Colleges Group. It is also working with a US university on a summer school programme for 2025.

But to be a “practical data centre skills” academy you need a data centre, and that is difficult and potentially very expensive, so since 2016 Carbon3IT has been looking for suitable sites. It was a journey with many false starts, but eventually, it found the facility it needed.

The NDCA is based in Royal Leamington Spa and its location has been determined by the proximity to excellent transport links, but also because it is the government’s stated intention to move data centre assets away from the congested London and South East and to the Midlands and North of the UK.

“We feel that that the location is ideal to cover the entire country and to not be “London” centric and that can be evidenced by new hyperscale projects being developed in the Midlands and North.

The end result Carbon3IT is working towards is an Academy that is for the sector, by the sector, to train tomorrow’s digital technicians.

“We see that the Government is developing a forward direct investment initiative and has already attracted £25 billion in new data centre assets,” Booth says. “All of this investment will require trained staff, which coupled with the existing global data centre skills shortage means that in our opinion the future is very bright. We’re planning to build two more practical skills training centres, one in the south of England and one in the north of England, and may move to a franchise model in other countries.”

Booth plans to keep abreast of new technologies and services, but also hopes that its members will begin to run their own training courses at the NDCA, and use it to launch new products.

“We are planning a series of events in 2025, the first is the ‘Data Centre of the Future’ event taking place on the 22nd of January,” Booth says. “We have got an impressive lineup of speakers covering such topics as Apprenticeships, Green Software, and the use of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), fuel cells, immersed computers, and sustainable construction materials. We are going to follow that with a series of workshops to create a ‘blueprint for future data centre development’. We want to bring together central government, local authorities, data centre operators and the data centre supply chain to sit around the table, identify the issues, develop solutions and publish the blueprint. This is a very exciting project and we are very pleased to be offered the opportunity to host the initiative.”