The six-person Harrogate tech firm taking on the likes of Microsoft for international awards

Interact is a sustainable IT consultancy helping to reduce energy and material waste in data centres, which consume between one to three per cent of the world’s electricity usage.

The firm has estimated that, if their consultancy services were used worldwide, they would reduce this impact by at least 50 per cent, the equivalent of decarbonising the entirety of the UK.

Managing director Rich Kenny noted how emissions from data centres are a relatively unknown issue amongst the public.

“Digitalisation is a key driver for improvement and transformation, and it touches every area of people’s lives, but something has to power that transformation,” he said.

“I think because it's in data centres, and it's hidden, people don't realise that what is powering it is fundamentally a load of metal and raw materials using a lot of energy.

“If you looked at an organisation and said I can remove 50 per cent of your physical waste, the answer would be: ‘I need to do that’.

“If the physical waste of your building was piling up outside you’d address it, but the physical waste from the data centre is energy, its environmental emissions, its carbon, and you just don't ever see it.”

The average savings which Interact achieved for data centres across five years is 3,500 tonnes of CO2e emissions, 9.6 MWh of energy, and over £1m in costs.

When providing its services, Interact will first use its machine learning technology to get an accurate reading of server efficiencies, looking at the make and model of the machines used and how their components are configured.

The firm then uses this to judge how energy efficient the servers are, giving each server a rating from A+ to F.

Interact then uses this information to advise a company how they can use their servers in a more energy efficient way.

This can include moving workloads from one server to another (through physical or virtual consolidation), reconfiguring existing hardware to improve its efficiency or replacing inefficient tech with optimal hardware, to reduce materials waste.

Interact can also advise on which location is the best place to run servers, depending on how electricity is produced in each server’s location, allowing companies to prioritise areas where electricity is produced through more environmentally friendly means.

“The carbon cost of energy is location dependent, so if you’ve got a data centre running in China or India for example, it may be more carbon intensive than it would be in Northern Europe,” said Astrid Wynne, head of sustainability.

“So if you’ve got a huge company which has multiple data centres, we can provide advice of which ones you want to be moving your work loads out of, or which ones you want to be building up from a carbon perspective.”

As well as reducing energy use, Interact also hopes their actions can reduce the need for servers to be built, thus lowering emissions associated with the manufacturing of new servers.

Interact was started in 2021, built from a research project looking at the most energy efficient way to configure servers.

In its first year, the company turned over six figures, with no external investment. It also turned a profit in its first year of operation.

Due to the success of the research project, Mr Kenny was invited to be a Visiting Research Fellow at London South Bank University.

The company has won 13 awards since it began, including the Energy Impact Award at the DatacentreDynamics (DCD) Awards, which Mr Kenny describes as “the data sector’s Oscars”.

Interact’s main competition for the award was Microsoft, who were nominated for the development of a hydrogen-powered data centre.

Other shortlists at the DCD Awards also featured the likes of Intel, Google and Meta.

Interact now provides its services to global companies such as Amazon web services, who Mr Kenny noted did not have ready-made infrastructure in place to be able to pay a company as small as theirs.

Ms Wynne noted how she hoped the success of Interact would lead to more awareness of the energy use of data centres more widely.

“Its coming,” she said, “people are looking at it, people are paying attention to it, and people are seeing value in a set of tools that will enable them to achieve that.

“We’ve had some quite significant success over the first year - but we still have to educate customers and the market on exactly what the tool does and what the benefits are.”

Originally from Harrogate, Mr Kenny noted how he was proud to be performing such cutting edge research in his hometown.

“We're at the forefront of cutting edge technology and research in environmental research,” he said.

“I think that's really awesome, and it's testament to some really clever people in Harrogate and Yorkshire.

“I think it's something we can be proud of in Yorkshire, proud of in Harrogate and proud of locally.”