INSIGHTS / News

Southampton SETsquared member, SoftIron, has announced it has received three separate Seal of Excellence awards from the European Commission. The Seal of Excellence was established in October 2015 to increase the quality of regional research grant funding. The awards recognise the quality of SoftIron’s R&D, as reflected in its grant proposals to the EC, focusing on the potential to slash energy consumption by large datacenters and enterprises.

The energy demands of data centres have exploded over the past ten years to about 3 per cent of global electricity consumption. In the US alone, DC electricity consumption is projected to increase to roughly 140 billion kilowatt-hours annually by 2020, the equivalent annual output of 50 large power plants.

Over the past 4 years SoftIron has earned a global reputation for delivering highly innovative technology solutions addressing this issue. The SoftIron Overdrive 3000 server is the first to be powered by AMD’s new Opteron A1100 System on Chip processor, based on an ARM 64-bit architecture. The processor consumes just 35 watts of power under normal load, a figure well below alternative CPU architectures used in mainstream data centre workloads.

Norman Fraser, CEO of SoftIron commented on the Seal of Excellence awards: “It is always encouraging to see new initiatives across Europe, especially those that not only recognise the commercial impact of start ups and new businesses in growth industries such as technology, but that also reward wider considerations such as sustainability. We have put substantial efforts into our R&D to deliver business solutions that combine performance with efficiency and it is great to see this recognised.

“Every year, thousands of organisations apply to the Horizon 2020 Programme. The European Commission runs one of the most complete evaluation systems in the world, screening against excellence, impact and the quality and efficiency of implementation. The Seal of Excellence is awarded to the applicants who meet the stringent qualifying criteria. We are very proud to have secured three separate awards and look forward to putting them to good use in securing additional funding in future.”