HP Services Offers Data Centre Construction Option

The services arm of Hewlett-Packard has expanded its data centre expertise to not just planning and design, but also construction of said facilities.

HP on 15 February unveiled its CFI (Critical Facilities Implementation) service, a move company officials said will streamline the process of building data centres and give enterprises one place to go for the entire process.

“There is tremendous demand [from businesses] to have a single point of contact,” Rick Einhorn, worldwide director of Critical Facilities Services for HP, said in an interview with eWEEK.

Construction Boom

The move comes at a time of expected growth in data centre construction. HP officials pointed to a Gartner study that indicated that 46 percent of respondents to a survey said they will build one or more data centres in the next two years, and 54 percent said they will have to expand existing facilities during the same time period.

Having a single vendor to oversee the entire process will help drive down overall costs, Einhorn said. Up to this point, HP has offered services the covered the bulk of the steps in the multi-million-dollar process of building a data centre, from assessment and design to project management and equipment.

“In the past, what was missing was that building piece,” he said.

HP has worked as the general contractor in some smaller projects in parts of Asia the last few years, getting the process down, David Dnistran, worldwide CFI director for HP’s Critical Facilities Service, said in an interview. Now the company wants to expand that implementation aspect to larger data centre projects worldwide in both emerging and mature markets, Dnistran said.

Gaining Trust

It probably will take a bit longer to find traction in the more mature markets, which he said tend to be more conservative and stick with what they know. However, Dnistran and Einhorn said they expect to grow the CFI business in such regions as North America and Europe.

Both said HP’s experience in designing and building its own data centres will be a key selling point going forward. Several years ago, the company underwent an aggressive program to consolidate 85 global data centres into six, a move that not only helped HP save millions of dollars but also could be used as a showcase for the company’s facility skills and data centre equipment.

HP also has been aggressive in the advancement of environmentally-friendly data centre designs that aim to help business reduce the power consumption at their facilities. HP bulked up its expertise in this space in 2007, when it bought EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a company that specialised in data centre construction services.

Slice Of Pie

The data centre construction industry represents a lucrative market for HP. Einhorn said he has seen market estimates for the design and construction of data centres at as much as $30 billion (£18.5 billion) or more. Over the past few years, as the economy soured and recession took hold, spending in this area was down, he said. However, now businesses are beginning to build again.

“The market is huge and it’s a big pie out there,” Dnistran said. “We want our slice of that pie.”

Einhorn said HP wasn’t looking to run construction companies out of business; rather he’ll be looking to partner with such companies, though now not only as the designer and architect of the facility, but also as the general contractor.

He said CFI would operate as an autonomous consultant, and wouldn’t be used as a way to just sell more HP equipment.

“If a customer is an HP house, great, we’ll go in that direction,” Einhorn said. “If they prefer another [data centre equipment] vendor, we can work with that as well.”