The market for data centers is growing year by year, and the Croatian metropolis will soon receive another large data storage system, possibly the largest. The latest data center will be located in Jankomir, Zagreb, where the American company Digital Realty plans to establish the new ZAG2 data center, near the existing ZAG1 data center. Shortly after acquiring the land for the expansion of the Zagreb campus, Goran Đoreski, the director of Digital Realty for Croatia and the region, explained that preliminary work on preparing the site has already begun and that the design of the facilities is nearing completion.
– The project will be built in at least two phases. This size of land is usually sufficient for a data center up to a capacity of 30 megawatts. ZAG2 will be built as a mixed-use facility that will flexibly meet the needs of various types of users – says Đoreski.
The new data center is part of plans to strengthen Digital Realty’s presence in Southeast Europe, where they are seeing increasing demand for colocation services. Zagreb will thus serve as a kind of gateway to the region, an area that analysts expect to grow significantly over the next few years.
– Currently, we are primarily addressing business and telecommunications users in Croatia and Southeast Europe. Southeast Europe is part of our broader Mediterranean strategy, which includes our highly developed hub in Marseille, as well as those currently developing, such as Barcelona, Rome, Crete, and Tel Aviv – explains Đoreski.
He also adds that the systems will comply with energy efficiency standards.
– Here, I primarily mean cooling systems and power supply systems. Our goal is high redundancy with five nines of availability. Security and monitoring will be set according to our global standard, which will allow all users worldwide to monitor the services provided in Zagreb in real-time. The communication link will be redundant, and our Service Fabric platform for cloud connectivity will also be available – says Đoreski.
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Since these are large systems, Digital Realty plans to return part of the produced heat to the community for heating, following the example of such implementations they have in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and North America.
– Our data center campus in Vienna, for example, will supply waste heat to the neighboring Floridsdorf hospital. The heated water will be used for heating the building and meeting hot water needs. The data center campus will be able to supply 50 to 70 percent of the hospital’s heating energy needs. The project is expected to save four thousand tons of CO2 emissions annually once fully operational. We will explore the possibilities of similar implementations at other locations, including ZAG2, if there is willingness and technical feasibility from the city’s heating system – announces Đoreski.
The ‘Data’ Center Race
With the acceleration of digitalization and the expansion of the cloud market, the demand for secure storage of large amounts of data is increasing, and the race to build data centers is accelerating at the same pace.
A recent example is A1 Hrvatska, which opened a data center in Novi Zagreb at the end of 2021, worth 11 million euros, with a capacity of two megawatts.
In Varaždin, the construction of a data center named DC North by Cratis is underway, which will span two thousand square meters and have more than four megawatts of power, for which the company invested 17 million euros.
Interestingly, the first data center in Croatia, that of Megatrend Business Solutions, was built about twenty years ago, while the Križ Data Center, a company in the IT group Setcor, was the first in Croatia to obtain the TIA-942 – Tier III certification.
Although a number of data centers operated by large companies have been functioning in Croatia for years, renting their spaces to smaller companies, Digital Realty is currently the only one planning to build a data center with a capacity of 30 megawatts.
