Colt's Blog

I’d like to say the days of taking the old crystal ball approach to planning data centre capacity is long gone, but what choice is there? You know you need data centre capacity, you’re building it on your own site, it’s a capital intensive project and it’s got to meet your needs for at least 10-15 years.

But let’s time travel back to 15 years ago. Would you have predicted the evolution of the information era the way it has grown? Could you have imagined Google would grow in the way it has done? That before you get to the end of this blog, 15 days-worth of video would be loaded to a thing called YouTube? That you could connect to the Internet wirelessly? That your mobile brick would be made smarter than your average genius and could tell you the weather, how to navigate around the city, tell your friends what you had for breakfast, all while watching the latest episode of Homeland and reading breaking news in one single device!

And yet we have to plan data centres 15 years in advance? Well, not anymore!

Working with a rigid, static legacy data centre isn’t ideal. We wanted to eliminate planning risks, reduce speculative investment and create dynamic energy efficiencies. So earlier this week, we announced Colt ftec data centre.

Building on our modular philosophy we have now enabled data centres to become even more flexible so that they can adapt to the agile nature of business. They’re built using our Flex technology. It’s genius really – now you don’t have to forecast long-term requirements, you can manage your upfront capital and longer term OPEX costs because you can closely match your data centre to your actual need.

Flexibility is designed around 3 key considerations for any data centre. Power, cooling and space.

Colt powerflex enables power to be scaled up and down to match exact capacity requirements throughout the lifetime of the datacentre. The interesting thing about this is, it’s upgraded dynamically, plug and play, from outside the IT area without any downtime. It takes away the need for costly and risky retrofits. It can even negate the need for building an entirely new data centre by allowing you to increase capacity.

Colt coolflex similarly enables cooling to be scaled up in line with the power, outside the IT area and with significantly reduced risk of downtime. It also enables tuning of the cooling in line with power usage so you can reach target efficiencies even at low loads. This can save millions in energy bills. Colt spaceflex optimises space available within the data centre, allowing mixed densities to run in the same hall: For more on the features have a look at our Colt ftec featuregraphic:

As a consumer of data centres as well as a provider, we understand the key concerns for data centre operation and maximising its useful life. In short, we’ve focused on optimising efficiencies when the data centre is deployed and through its lifetime. Data centre decisions needn’t be long-term guestimates. Instead they should offer greater agility, adapt to the changing requirements of your business, offer greater energy efficiencies and reduce speculative investments allowing you to concentrate on your business.

The way we see it is business just got easier and technology just got smarter.

Twitter: @dcvicsmith

Data centre forecasting is not for the faint hearted. Let’s say a company decides to increase its data centre capacity. Generally you have a lot of different inputs into the decision making process; IT, facilities, Data centre operations, procurement, CIO, CFO, executive board. Each of these roles has a different focus and nobody wants to get such a significant capital investment wrong. Rightly, they want to ensure the capital is wisely spent and will suit their needs long into the future, after all changing your mind after the fact is expensive and risky! So rather than forecasting the foreseeable future (2-5 years) they need to somehow forecast for 10-15 years.

But all over Europe, what started as a whisper has built into a loud chorus: Why can’t we make data centre decisions in line with our short to medium term business needs? Why do we need to forecast our data centre need for 10 years into the future when the compute and application cycle is refreshed every 3-5 years? Why can’t we future proof the data centre?

Here at Colt, we’ve been thinking. Why not give our customers what they’ve been asking for? A data centre that can adapt to the needs of the business without a costly and risky retrofit. Reduce speculative investment and obliterate planning risk. Seems a little crazy, but it just might work!

So we got all our clever designers into a room and asked them to make a data centre that could align with business needs, and more, that adapted to future business needs. We were being ridiculous they said, it couldn’t be done. No-one else can do it, why do you think we can? But we knew they were clever folks. A few weeks later, unshaven, sleep deprived but excited they emerged from the room (did I mention it was locked?). “We’ve done it”, they said.

What exactly did they do? They took our modular data centre but made it even more flexible. Not just when the data centre is deployed but flexible features that can be employed through the lifetime of the data centre. You can increase the power and the cooling, put high and low densities in the same hall, you can even operate at target efficiency at low load. They put in dynamic flexibility so you can take the guess work out of forecasting. Now you can get the data centre you need and adjust it later for future needs. And just so you remember that its built with flex technology, we’ve called it the Colt ftec data centre. Available in all good data centre shops.

Next week Colt will be a Silver Sponsor at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Barcelona - a gathering of over 4,000 CIOs and analysts. Why? Because we absolutely agree with Gartner’s key theme for the event.

“Disruptive technologies like cloud, social, big data, and mobile are revolutionising business. The opportunity to leverage information innovation is right before us.

“For many organizations, this powerful nexus of forces will pose significant challenges, requiring a flexible new approach to architectures, delivery systems, processes and practices that support enterprise goals and address the growing demands of end users.”

As I wrote in my previous blog, there are three underlying trends that will carry these changes into 2013:

• The software defined data centre
• The software defined network
• The consumerisation of IT and the growth of information

This year’s Gartner Symposium offers a great opportunity for Colt to engage and learn from IT leaders from across Europe to discuss those trends and how the CIO has to increasingly move towards centre stage.

We have a team from across Colt that will be taking part in the conference, exhibition and all of the other activities that will make Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2012 a great event to attend. Whether you are interested in talking about the impact of modular data centres; the issues in transitioning to a service model; or the best way to deliver services back to your business, we will have a Colt expert on hand.

To quote Gartner further: “The most successful CIOs and senior IT leaders will embrace the future by turning their attention to growth, cost reduction and competitive differentiation — all the while filtering out the unproductive “noise” that can compromise clarity and purpose.” We look forward to seeing you there.

A full Symposium agenda by session can be found here.

Find out more on Colt’s attendance – looking forward to meet you there in person!

There continues to be a cacophony of marketing noise from technology vendors about their cloud strategies; while the announcements sometimes include messaging for their channel, many partners are still unsure of their future role in the industry. Nearly two years ago, Tim Harmon and I (Peter O'Neill here) published two reports on this, and earlier this year the Cloud and Technology Transformation Alliance (CCTA) reported that its survey of 229 channel partners in North America revealed that 13% of the partners still lack a cloud strategy altogether and 42% describe their strategy as “nascent” or “evolving.” CCTA also collected the alarming statistic that 65% of channel partners know that they’re losing business because of their cloud shortcomings; that is, the partners know that their customers are asking for cloud services but cannot react.

I have regular unofficial “inquiries” with channel partners here in Europe resulting from vendor-client engagements where I am involved in partner training. I offer my email address and am happy to invest my time in answering their inquiries because the questions I get from the partners informs and enriches my research. Based on these conversations, I can report that the picture in Europe is not much different than the above numbers. I usually give them this advice: Pick a project team of sales and support people — perhaps 5% of your workforce — and have them put together one cloud service version of an existing products and services. Sometimes that means switching vendors, but often the existing product vendor already has a cloud version available. When the team is ready, it should go out and sell the cloud version to new customers as a new branded service line. This project team will gain experience in how to sell, how to bill, and how to pay for the cloud service.

I am looking forward to discussing this and other hot channel topics at the upcoming Channel Focus Western Europe 2012 conference, which will be held on November 13 and 14 in Brussels. This event is organized by Baptie and Company, which hosts and manages many partner communities and services for tech vendors. I am sure that the event will be well-attended by senior executives working with the channel in the IT and telco industries — many have told me that they will be there.

My last observation on the topic of channel and cloud is to point out the great cloud strategy being executed by Colt Technology Services. My colleague Tirthankar Sen wrote a great blog post a few months ago about distributors and telcos not cooperating enough on cloud computing. Colt has made several moves in the last months to promote its VMware-, EMC-, and Cisco-based cloud offerings through a channel. In April, the service provider launched SmartOffice, a “franchise program” for France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, targeting three to five partners per country. In September, Colt made two strategic plays: first signing up value-added distributor Magirus as its first cloud services distributor and then acquiring the vendor ThinkGrid, which provides cloud business management services such as billing. ThinkGrid also has a partner ecosystem that encompasses more than 300 partners that build and deliver public and private clouds.

What do you think? Are there other shining examples of cloud partner strategies you know about? Please let me know. As always, I’d love to hear from you on this and other topics. Always keeping you informed!

Peter

Earlier this month I was delighted to present on stage at VMworld Colt’s new vCloud 5.1: I was joined on-stage by Tona Monedero (CIO of Codorniu, more of which later). I talked about our geographic rollout of vCloud, and how at Colt we now have a cloud platform that is fit for purpose when it comes both to end-user and Channel requirements (take a look at the short presentation below). The development work that Colt has done with VMware to bring vCloud to this new standard means that the system is easier to integrate and configure than ever before. For the Channel it represents a more manageable solution that has been previously seen.

At Colt we’ve opted to present our vCloud Virtual Data Centre services in two different flavours. Our “Enterprise” vDC guarantees a high resource availability with some burst capacity. “Enterprise” is a comprehensive package for a typical production IT requirements. We then also have an “Essentials” vDC package which focuses on guaranteed lower resources commitment level, but with a higher burst capacity. “Essentials” is better-suited for development, for disaster recovery or for applications with less performance sensitivity, giving you reliability but at a lower price point than “Enterprise”. For both of these vDC packages we’ve changed our price structure too, offering compelling value for resellers and customers. When you combine these features with the ability to access local vCloud instances in London, Paris, Frankfurt or Madrid and you have a very powerful, European-wide solution. Colt’s data centre estate is entirely based in Western Europe, ensuring that customer data never leaves the EU. However we can now configure solutions tuned to customer sensitivity about workloads and data within key national boundaries.

At VMworld we demonstrated two proof-of-concepts that we have developed after listening to our customers’ needs. The first is a vDC back-up solution from ourselves and Symantec powered by the latest release of the popular NetBackup technology, implementing a Back-up As A Service provision for resellers. The second demonstration is a replication and disaster recovery package that we created with Zerto. This allows us to provide real time replication within shared service (like vCloud) with recovery achievable within one click. It was great to be able to demonstrate both of these solutions, and to gain feedback from resellers and customers at our Colt stand.

Finally, I had the great pleasure of welcoming Tona Monedaro, CIO of wine producer Grupo Codorniu, to the stage to talk about her experiences of working with Colt and the vCloud service. Tona pointed out cloud infrastructure permits her to focus the skills of her team on managing vendors externally and managing business change internally; they no longer need extensive knowledge and accreditations in many of the constituent technologies. As such, Codorniu built their online store within a Colt cloud framework and predicted the increasing need for an IT partner that could deliver agility on the scale she needed. Tona’s comments really brought home to me why an internally-managed IT resource is no longer a viable option. Not only is it unnecessary to own the physical assets, but it is unnecessary to have all the lower-level technical skills on your payroll.

VMworld had a great buzz this year. We had lots of official programme content promoting the move to hybrid and public vCloud, but also lots of vendor and customer interaction demonstrating that the trend is well-established. Codorniu may be one of the early adopters, but their example will be rapidly copied by other smart mid-size SMB’s this year.