Today’s economic realities can make it increasingly difficult for organisations to bear the brunt of the heavy upfront costs and extended construction times required for a traditional datacentre build.
One of the issues is that as the performance of devices rapidly increases and the ubiquity of the internet unfolds, our strategies around building the IT infrastructures to support them needs to rapidly evolve too and failures to do so is resulting in issues which negatively impact the business process.
Today’s sophisticated, pre-engineered and pre-fabricated containerised solutions enable organisations to deploy IT equipment, capacity, and services in less time, for less cost. They offer a technically viable and cost-effective alternative that allows the planning cycle to switch from an onsite construction focus to onsite integration of pre-manufactured, pre-tested blocks of power and cooling. This can significantly reduce the potential quality and time risks typically found in traditional fixed-facility, site-constructed approaches and enables organisations to deploy IT equipment, capacity, and services in less time, for less cost, and under new and more business-appropriate delivery and costing models.
Regardless of industry sector or specific requirements modularised and containerised datacentres offer a number of advantages over traditional datacentre deployments. An optimised ecosystem can be built with the right amount of power, cooling, capacity needed, etc. because of its balanced system design which in turn offers a whole range of other advantages:
- Substantial Time Savings:
Typically just 6-8 weeks for a reference design. - Can be deployed at scale:
A module can be delivered with 400 to 2,000 servers pre-wired, tested and ready to go in a couple of hours since all of the tests and networking are completed at the factory. - Risk Adverse:
Standard controlled & proven design factory build environment. Nothing is unique and everything is constantly value engineered. Eliminates stranded capacity, increases reliability and provides guarantees such as PuE ratios. - Plug and play:
Just turn on & go! Installation is easy with nothing more than a power connection, a water connection (for cooling) and a data connection. - Pay as you grow:
Completely modular, scalable and mobile. Moves cost from upfront investment to server deployment: One of the big advantages for containerised and modular datacentres is the fact that you pay as you go since the power, cooling and IT scale together. This really delays capital costs but also eliminates the unused capacity as the datacentre is filling up which provides huge cost savings.
Containerised datacentres by their very nature provide a very standardised format and are ideal for easy deployment and shipping. For those that place a high value on early delivery where the cost of time is important, a containerised facility could be ideal when any time delays could prove to be commercially problematic.
If the requirement is for quicker deployment to get better use of capital they provide faster, cheaper ways to “step and repeat” computer power and support systems. In co-lo applications, containerised datacentres allows cost-effective upsizing and downsizing in large kW modular building blocks when demand for their services fluctuates as a result of market conditions.
They are also useful in retrofit and upgrade projects when datacentres are out of power and cooling capacity or just out of physical space. For these, a containerised datacentre enables capacity to be added quickly and cost-effectively.
Datacentre operators in leased facilities may not want to pour money into a fixed asset that has to be left behind so a containerised solution could be attractive because if the lease is not renewed, the containers can physically move with them.
If datacentre facilities are saddled with existing infrastructure characterised by poor PUE where only marginal gain can be achieved within the constraints of their existing physical plan, then a containerised datacentre could be used to improve efficiency and reduce energy costs and carbon emissions. Adding modular containers provides an alternative method to help solve problems inherent to the inefficient datacentre design they may have inherited.
For organisations with vacant space such as an empty warehouses containerised datacentre solutions offer the benefit of leveraging unutilised space as well as avoiding the delays and construction costs of building a new brick and mortar wing.
on365 is launching a range of entry level containerised datacentres2GO starting at just £32,475 inclusive of container, UPS, cooling, racks, basic PDUs, smoke detectors, electric panels, lighting & access control. We’ll be showcasing our new datacentres2GO at DCW 2015. Visit stand E93 for additional 5% discount voucher.
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