What do we want? Future-proofing! When do we want it? Now!

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.