Would You Buy A Data Centre Delivered By Truck?

New servers are coming

Sales of new infrastructure may have taken a hit during the downturn but they will be back with a vengeance according to analysts. Recent research from analyst Gartner (Data Center Power, Cooling and Space: A Worrisome Outlook for the Next Two Years) revealed that as the recovery takes hold, the recent dip in server sales will quickly be replaced by a boom. While the worldwide server market declined by 16.8 percent in volume in 2009, the analyst predicts that the market will recover from 2010 onward, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.5 percent for shipments over the next four years.

Building more data centres to house these more demanding servers may not be popular with environmentalists or the chief financial officers who have to foot the bill, but for many businesses they are a necessity and indeed form the economic fabric of a country, no less. The financial services industry for example is facing regulations such as MIFID and Basel II which require increasing amounts of data to be stored and for longer periods, putting pressure on already strained IT systems.

So why not build a new data centre?

There are an increasing number of ways to provision new data centre infrastructure that are both environmentally and financially sustainable. Choosing to build a dedicated data centre which makes use of the latest cooling and green building design approaches is one option. However while these kind of bespoke facilities may be sustainable in the long term, they usually come with significant upfront costs and can take years to get online and are harder to change as organisations requirements change..

Another option when it comes to a dedicated data centre is the shipping container approach which has the advantage of being relatively easy to deploy and being relatively affordable. The obvious downside of these units however is that while they may useful as a temporary stop-gap, they don’t have the shelf-life or scalability that many enterprises will be looking for and are harder to alter as companies require change.

A middle way between these two extremes would be a dedicated sustainable data centre that was quick to deploy but had the robustness and scalability that enterprises are looking for. This is exactly the approach that Colt has taken with its newly launched Modular Data Centres. Operated by a new business division, Colt Data Centre Services, the modular units can be used to create a fully functioning 500 metre-squared facility in less than four months.