Colt Data Centre Services (DCS) will operate the 19 data centres the company already owns across Europe, representing 21,000 sq m of space between them. The company is also launching what it claims is a radical new approach to the data facilities market – the Colt Modular Data Centre.
Under this model, units of 500 sq m that include all power and cooling elements are built to order in a Newcastle manufacturing facility before being transported to a final location – either a Colt managed data centre site, or a site of the customer’s own choosing.
Colt DCS general manager Akber Jaffer said the stackable units allow power-efficient, turnkey data-centre space to be made available to customers in less than four months from initial order, much faster than new-build centres. He expects early customers for the modular units to include telecoms service providers looking to provision data-centre space to support their move into new service areas.
“Telecoms companies are now dealing with a lot of new technologies, like Ethernet, that are delivering improved bandwidth and simpler provisioning, and which are also allowing them to move up the stack to the software and applications layer,” he said. “This is changing the infrastructure they require, putting demands for example on the size and type of data centre space they need. Where they are branching out into infrastructure as a service, for example, there’s a fundamental requirement that they look at data centres to support that part of their business. It’s the same really for any sort of managed services offer.”
