Network Communications News (NCN) NCN-July2017 | Page 10

TALKING POINT Prefabrication – The Winning Formula for Edge Data Centres Speed to data, that’s what it’s all about, says Mark O’Sullivan, regional sales director at Flexenclosure. I n a wo rld where data is be ing in crea s in gly ge ne rate d and dema nded pl a net - wid e rather tha n j us t in t h e T ie r 1 c ities , the winn er s in t h e colocation a nd cl o ud s e r v ic e s race wi ll be the compa nie s t h at c an d e l iver data the fa s te s t to e nd u sers worl dwide. But here’s the issue… in order to meet the demands of enterprises outsourcing to the cloud, or indeed end consumers wanting a faster more seamless 10 | July 2017 experience when using social media or content streaming services, most of the existing hyperscale data centres are too far away from users in Tier 2 or 3 cities and certainly too far from emerging economies, with the result that latency increases and user experience suffers.  The solution of course is to build new data centres physically closer to these users and with large enterprises having facilities distributed geographically, colocation and cloud providers need to be thinking seriously about establishing facilities closer to the edge, with secure access to multiple networks.  In these regional cities or developing markets though, building hyperscale facilities is costly, time consuming and they’d be way oversized for the local market’s requirements. So this is where more flexible prefabricated facilities – such as Flexenclosure’s eCentre – come in to their own.