Addressing the scalability challenge

Just like our customers, four or five years ago, we were struggling to address cost efficiency and scalability in our data centres. Our aim was to deliver the quality of a well-designed traditional data centre build, cutting costs and meeting green efficiencies.

At this time, the containerised data centre was seen as the only ‘quick fix’ solution. It was said it could cut the expense and time to get data centre space up and running by constructing a pre-configured IT unit housed in a shipping container. For us, as for many of our customers, this wasn’t a viable option and we needed to think outside of the box (pardon the pun).

Our goal was to transform data centre design and delivery to provide quality ‘off the shelf’ data centres that deliver the reliability, security and efficiency of the traditional data centre in half the time.

Our modular approach and design now means you can have a data centre in four months rather than 18 or 36. It’s just like a ‘traditional’ data centre, but not designed, planned or built in the traditional ‘handmade’ way.

We use modern production line techniques to manufacture more than 120 different standard data centre designs – a number that’s always growing in response to customer needs. The long traditional process of design is replaced with fast, simple configuration of standalone modules. We then build and test the customer’s chosen configuration in quality-controlled factory conditions, ship it to their location (or to an existing Colt wholesale site if preferred) and install it.

The whole process can take just four months: from configuration to installation and plug-in. We see it as the consumerisation of the data centre.