data centre consultancy
‘Stripping
back to the
fundamental
question,
“what do
you want to
achieve?” is
more vital
than ever.’
IT is increasingly integral
to companies’ wider business
strategies as well as their day-
to-day operation. Even now,
high-profile examples of server
downtime are acting as huge
reputational issues affecting
stock prices and customer
perceptions. This is only set to
continue as businesses grow their
reliance on big data, automation
and systems underpinned by
highly available systems.
Often end-users have a
preconceived idea of what they
want for their data centre system.
From a design perspective this
can be any number of in-house,
co-located, cloud systems or hybrid
solutions. Often they are blinded to
new technology on the market and
the latest cutting edge systems.
Stripping the process back to the
fundamental question, ‘what do
you want to achieve?’ is more vital
than ever.
Clients have never been faced
with a range of options as broad
as they are today. Navigating this
with them can show clients that
initial plans, and the combination
of new technology they want to
include, may be too expensive, or,
in the worst cases, not meet their
objectives when maintenance and
design are factored in.
Too often the industry simply
takes the brief from clients without
challenging it. We now work with
clients before they put design and
build tenders out to the market -
working alongside internal teams
to develop a system that meets
their needs, is future-proof and is
cost efficient in the long term.
As one example, one of the
biggest operational costs clients
face in running their own in-house
data centre is cooling and failure
of this can result in significant
downtime. Design teams will often
aim to ensure that cooling systems
are optimised across rack space
but, when it comes to operation –
FM teams need to be in the loop
to work out whether different
permutations of cooling systems
will be easy to access and maintain.
As the industry attempts to
meet best practice guidance set
out by the BSEN50600 standard,
collaboration will become even
more important. With both design
and maintenance considerations
in the guidelines, simply having
one party at the table is unable
to produce a cutting edge data
centre any longer. Particularly if
clients are tempted to overinvest
in new technology without
considering their current and
expected capacity needs and the
long term maintenance costs of
these systems.
July 2017 | 33