Victor Smith, Director, Product Development for Colt Data Centre Services. Victor joined the team on 28th May. In his new role, Victor is key in cementing Colt's data centre product and service strategy as we look to innovate and extend our reach. Victor works very closely with the design team as well as with the marketing to ensure our future roadmap takes into account not only market requirements and further engineering innovations, but also continues to be optimally positioned in the market.
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.
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