Colt has created a new model of data centre manufacture that it claims is faster, more efficient and creates an end product that gives customers far more options.

Its new modular data halls can be built in four months, in contrast to the 15 months that a traditional data centre will keep contractors occupied. Better still, these new units can be scaled up, so the whole system is more manageable, meaning that the customer (the end user) enjoys a great degree of control. These scalable, efficienlty produced units do for the data centre industry what Dell achieved for the PC industry, some analysts claim

the efficiencies have been achieved by redesigning the production process, explained Guy Ruddock, Colt’s data centre infrastructure service director. A veteran of the oil industry, he applied the same disciplines to data centre building that are used in oil rig production. "As much as possible, keep the building process off site," he said.

Data centre units (halls) can be built off site and delivered to the customer. (Or indeed, managed by Colt). The customer can then aggregate these units, much in the way PCs were networked together to form LANs. Buying by increments solves many financing isues, and gives the CIO greater flexibility, argues Ruddock.

Traditional data centre production, which took place on a client's site, could take as long as 15 to 18 months, during which around 200 expensive engineers would need to be on site. Now, by re-engineering the process into a well defined, highly ordered manufacturing discipline, those expensive labout costs can be rationalised. "The maximum number of people we'd tie up at any one time would be 15," says Ruddock. "Believe me, engineers don't come cheap, so why would you want to pay for 200 of them to be milling around on site, waitinf for thier turn to do their job?"

Ruddock said that getting data centres built off site, by specialists, is the logical next step in the data centre industry. "Colt has been building data centres for 15 years, so we know how to do it efficiently," he said.