Climate in the datacentre market
The need to address climate change puts the ball firmly in IT's court, notes Huw Owen
Climate change risk has put the spotlight on datacentre efficiency, and a multitude of new opportunities for systems integrators.
When the UK government's Climate Change Agreement (CCA) for datacentres came into force, it put energy firmly back on the boardroom agenda and increased the pressure on enterprise IT departments to consider the cost implications of running a power-hungry datacentre.
That's great news for systems integrators, which stand to gain valuable annuity revenue streams as enterprises look to outsourcing as an alternative to their current practice – ensuring application performance by overprovisioning capacity on servers, switches and storage.
Today's enterprises are actively looking for better value in most areas and datacentres, network infrastructures and connectivity are no exception. In the past, system integrators may have viewed the datacentre market as too expensive or too complicated for their customers, but that is no longer the case.
Many of today's specialist independent datacentres offer entry-level colocation space that is cost-effective for any size of operation – even small SMBs.
As IT managers look to system integrators to get the maximum performance and efficiency out of their enterprise infrastructures – or support with virtualisation, big data and BYOD trends – one thing is clear. Today's datacentre needs to be in a near-constant state of modernisation and evolution to cope with a future that's increasingly all about flexibility and change.
And that presents a key opportunity for integrators. By partnering with a specialised datacentre provider that's equipped to address, for example, the unpredictable workloads associated with mobile, social and analytical applications or the next big technology evolution, they're free to pitch the convenience and reduced risk of a flexible, future-proofed solution that's delivered on a single order number.
As energy prices continue to escalate, power consumption is becoming a big issue for enterprise customers. But recent innovations in the datacentre industry have enabled dramatic efficiency and cost savings that are out of the reach of most IT managers. And that changes the rules of the game for resellers.
By combining leading-edge power efficiency and cooling technologies with revolutionary operational approaches, today's datacentre pioneers are able to operate at a building PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.25 – 70 per cent lower than the datacentre norm. That can add up to savings of about £1.1m a year and 6,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.
Such savings are additional to the economy-of-scale advantages that datacentres traditionally have been able to offer.
For system integrators, this reduced cost of operation represents a significant opportunity to maximise revenue margins for themselves. Alternatively, they can elect to pass on savings, pitching directly to customers on power and environmental issues: ‘Is your power consumption higher than it should be?', ‘Would you like to save money while increasing the performance of your datacentre?'.
Because as enterprises become more accountable to shareholders on issues such as datacentre emissions and sustainability, energy efficiency has the potential to become a game changer for securing future business deals.
Finally, today's datacentre industry now offers the real-time asset management, security and environmental monitoring capabilities that address the ongoing compliance requirements of enterprises. And that makes it possible for integrators to act as solution providers who can lighten the load, tackling a broad range of challenges IT managers face on a daily basis.
The datacentre industry has changed. The innovators in this space offer the future-proofed and innovative flexibility that eliminates risk and complexity, paving the way for resellers and integrators to go to market with confidence. Resellers can use the datacentre as a commodity that is simply packaged and sold – generating additional revenue deals and margin (from power mark-up, for example).
Or use it as a resource to create new disruptive solutions including converged cloud, storage and infrastructure services. Either way, the datacentre opens the door to deeper, more enduring value-add customer relationships and makes it possible for resellers and integrators to respond quickly to today's fast-changing contractual demands.
Huw Owen is chief executive of Ark Data Centres