Convergence helps create better facilities

WITH THE CONTINUING consumerisation of IT and the growth of cloud computing, demand for data centres continues to remain high. There is an increasing importance to deliver solutions that offer maximum flexibility and efficiency without compromise. Data centre solutions need to be able to accommodate the latest IT technology to ensure businesses can scale their facilities to meet the demands of their customers and not be constrained by legacy design or infrastructure.

Keysource has built on many years experience and developed a set of standardised blueprints offering Modular Data Centre Infrastructure (MDCI), which delivers world-class solutions in a scalable and flexible way.

Delivering key benefits
Taking the Keysource MDCI modular approach reduces development times, whilst achieving high levels of quality, reliability, efficiency and performance in a cost effective manner. It enables data centre owners and operators to have a solution tailored to their individual needs, utilising proven and established designs, providing many benefits. MDCI can be hdeployed as part of a new or existing development due to the scalable flexible nature of the components that do not require integration to the building shell and are not built on centralised infrastructure.

This in turn allows a company to be agile, responding effectively to the demands of a business and its customers with flexibility around capacity, footprint and resilience to meet changing requirements. Adaptability is also a key benefit, providing data centre owners the flexibility to offer mixed density and performance without additional upfront cost. This allows the adoption of the latest high performance IT and drives the lowest Total Cost of Ownership.

Joined-up approach
The ultimate aim is to deliver a design focused on the IT which encompasses all critical infrastructure for both the power and cooling requirements as well as the network infrastructure needed to support the specific applications. However, in many cases these areas are handled by different specialist teams working independently of one another which can impact performance, and increase cost and time.

With that in mind Keysource and Panduit, a world-class developer and provider of leading solutions that help customers optimise their physical infrastructure, started discussions on how to develop a more joined-up approach that delivered the benefits of MDCI, but also considered the active equipment being deployed by the end users. Panduit has a track record in developing reference architecture for this type of infrastructure having already worked with server and network manufacturers to develop highly efficient flexible solutions.

Choice equals better performance
The approach delivers a joined-up optimised design from the outset with a standard set of blueprints where Panduit and Keysource bring together all key aspects of data centre design, incorporating both the power and cooling elements with the IT architecture and network infrastructure. From a standardised design aimed at enterprise customers this provides the flexibility to deploy equipment in new as well
as existing facilities, whilst accommodating
individual needs and choices about vendor and
overall capacity.

Maximum flexibility and efficiency
Existing integrated modular solutions often require compromise or place constraints due to the vendor specific and productised nature of solutions. Elsewhere bespoke design can increase cost and complexity making it harder to provide scalable growth. By adopting an integrated design based on the needs of the enterprise customer this approach delivers all the benefits of a modular solution plus many more.

For example efficiency is often constrained to one aspect or separate components within a data centre or is so specific to the IT it cannot be recreated. However, by adopting a joined-up approach customers can benefit from a data centre that delivers efficiency across the whole system with the ability to manage through a single portal. This ensures optimum performance through the lifecycle and will include all aspects of infrastructure and systems that monitor, manage and ultimately control the performance of the IT, M&E and the facility.

In addition, the existing blue print designs can be fine-tuned to seamlessly fit with the customer’s preferred vendor equipment and changing requirements. This provides an opportunity to develop strategic data centre plans off of a common set of designs and management tools without the need to opt for one single vendor. This offers flexibility and commercial advantage, as well as enabling organisations to benefit from future innovation and technology trends.

The future
With a common goal of delivering world class data centre solutions Panduit and Keysource believe this strategic joined-up approach offers substantial benefits to end users and professional data centre operators.

By working together and combining different areas of expertise, Panduit and Keysource believe that they can create better facilities that provide a simpler more flexible solution delivering more value to customers. Moving forward, this kind of collaborative working will grow in popularity as the focus moves away from segmented engineering solutions to concentrate more on overall performance.