HP has entered into a contract with Norwegian real-estate firm Entra to build the company what is destined to become of the most eco-friendly data centers out there. When operational the facility will be serving both government and private sector customers in need of public cloud IT resources, both storage and compute.  The green motive will be made particularly evident.

“The government has pointed to the need for coordination, consolidation and joint data center solutions in Norway. Such consolidation could mean billions in savings for the state and other public sectors,” Entra said in a statement.

The data center will be hosted in a 30,000-square meter facility, with an overall energy input of just over 60Mw.  Half of the heat emitted by the servers will be recycled back into energy, and Entra will go with free air cooling in order to further minimize the footprint associated with keeping a large server farm at the right temperature. This will also result in the second reason behind the decision to go green: a smaller footprint means fewer overheads for the data center operator.

Hewlett-Packard has gotten itself involved with the environmental data center trend a long while ago. Back in 2011 we covered the joint initiative started by HP and several other hardware makers in collaboration with New York State; a joint R&D effort conceived to disrupt polluting clouds.

This is only one of the areas HP has been pursuing. Storage is a much bigger focus for the company, and it has done a lot more innovation in this area so far. The most recent milestone update was announces yesterday: the debut of the next generation ProLiant servers, codenamed Gen8. The product line introduces a whole new level of automation, with the hopes of seeing at least as much adoption in the industry as Moonshot.