Colt’s New Modular Data Centre
By Nick Booth, editor, IT-Footprint.co.uk
Traditional data centres have encumbered their users with build, cost and flexibility issues. Colt claims to have invented a way to manufacture high quality, energy efficient data centre halls, which can be aggregated to form a vast unit.  Produced in a fraction of the time traditionally devoted to data centre building, the new modular design could also deliver big savings in energy consumption. But does it stack up?
Old style data centres took years to build and were often obsolete by the time they were delivered. In response, the industry created cheaper containerised data centres, but these were extremely limited in function and their incompatibility made them expensive to manage and unsustainable. Now Colt claims it has created a third generation of system, which is faster to build, more efficient and scalable – what they term, a ground breaking invention. A detailed examination of the processes involved is called for.
New thinking for a new generation of data centres
Arguably Colt’s new breakthrough in data centre design is as significant, in its own way, as Henry Ford using mass production for car manufacturing. Colt has sped up the production of these computing behemoths, so that new data centres can be made faster, with an end product that is more versatile. It claims to have achieved this by eliminating the wasteful routines, duplication of efforts, delays and bottlenecks in the production process. The biggest change is that the building process takes place off site. The end product is more flexible too and each unit can be networked with others to form an aggregation every bit as powerful as a traditional monolithic data centre.
There are three major benefits for the end user. The product benefits from the streamlining of design and processes in manufacture, improvements which are passed on to the consumer.  Production is quicker, (four months rather than two years) so there is no risk of the technology being rendered obsolete by the time it is delivered.  And the actual product itself has many inbuilt efficiencies that make it more powerful and less expensive to run.
In short, it saves the customer time, running costs and energy. With energy conservation top of the agenda on every boardroom in the country, as electricity prices soar, carbon footprints of big corporations are a major concern.
Colt’s new manufacturing process has made data centres almost a commodity product. Their rapid construction, off site, and to order, could save IT departments and facilities manager’s significant time and give them more options as they plan growth.
Satisfying the needs of many
The people in charge or ordering data centres for large organisations are an eclectic group from a mixed range of disciplines. Whether they are engineering oriented facilities managers, application obsessed IT directors or hard headed financial directors, they will all need to examine the reasons why these new data centres could save them so much time and energy.
The central question they will be asking themselves is this: why were traditional data centres so wasteful and how has the new modular data centre eliminated this waste?  Why do modular data centres succeed where containers failed?
To answer this, it’s worth taking a look at the traditional method of creating a data centre. This was more like a construction project, with most of the work done on site and involving various teams. These teams would work on various elements of the build. “As many as 200 people could be found milling about on site, with many drinking tea while they waited their turn to be able to fulfil their particular duty,” explains Colt’s sales director Chris Grant.  With Colt’s new system, the maximum number of people you’ll ever see working on site will be around 15.
Such is the nature of construction, fate has it that the teams do not always complement each other in the building process. In traditional projects some jobs, such as IT installation and configuration, cannot begin until the work of others – such as cooling system engineers, power contractors and cabling teams - have laid the foundations.  When there are delays, which are inevitable in any construction process where unknown territory is being chartered, the knock on effect can be expensive, as teams of contractors find themselves on site, but unable to start work until another team has completed its task.
A consequence of all these delays and production bottlenecks was that building a data centre on site could take, on average, 12 to 15 months. It has been known to drag on for two or even three years. A week is a long time in politics. But three years is an eternity in the IT industry. If your IT is three years old by the time it is delivered, it will be so outdated it would risk being defunct. Three years represents a lot of technology paradigm shifts.
Making the data centre work
Two of Colt’s top engineering brains decided to tackle this iniquity.  Guy Ruddock, Colt’s data centre infrastructure service director is a veteran of the oil industry. He saw similarities in data centre construction to situations he’d lived through when drilling for oil. Ruddock argued that the lessons learned in oil rig construction could be applied to building a data mining rig too.
“All the people involved in construction are highly skilled. Take it from me, turbo diesel engineers don’t come cheap. To pay for them to be on site, but unable to work, is a tragic waste of money. So we set out set out to create the platforms in advance, as much as possible,” says Ruddock. In partnership with Colt engineer Neil Ashdown, they set out to jointly design a template for modular construction that would eliminate the cost from three main areas of the process that seemed to involve most expense.
The central idea is to create a 500 square metre data hall into which all the relevant components could be preassembled. These spacey, uncluttered steel units are welded together in a factory in Newcastle. They look deceptively simple, but like most well engineered products, the simplicity is a fusion of form and function. The floor of each unit, for example, is strong enough to bear the load of any equipment that can be mounted on it, be it a UPS unit or rack of SAN (storage area networking) storage. In traditional data centre construction, floors frequently have to be rebuilt and reinforced to bear the load of heavy equipment. Colt pre-empts this problem. There is ample room for underfloor cabling, taking much of the pain and expense away from the connectivity phases of construction. The layout is designed for classic hot and cold aisles, with air cooling as the main temperature control, with a back up system of chilled water ready for deployment if necessary and DX on offer as a standby. “DX will rarely be needed in the UK climate,” says Ruddock.
One of the most important components of a data centre is the UPS (uninterruptable power supply) unit. It’s also one of the noisiest, and there have been cases in Surrey of planning permission for data centres being denied by councillors worried about noise levels. Colt’s design pre-empts this, with each hall being empowered with the quietest UPSs on record. “The smaller the UPS the more efficient it is, and the less cooling you need,” says Ashdown. Colt’s modular data halls consequently need use fewer resources and make less noise.
It’s the structured design of the data halls that makes them efficient. All units can be partitioned off, so a heat or dust contamination problem would not spread. Pillars help to give each data hall its clean classic design look – they also help to hide all the trunking from view.
All the components of the system – the processing unit, storage, lighting controllers and cooling systems for example – are pre-tested before fitting. All of which eliminates a lot of the dead time from the production process, saving on the expense of employing site engineers on exorbitant daily rates. Even the components of the diesel fuelled emergency power generators can be swapped out in replaced in days if needed. Previously, this was an ominous task that could cause weeks of delay.
The new off site pre-built data centre manufacturing process is akin to car production, with a number of clear work stations marking out the different stages of assembly. At station 8, for example, teams may work on a data hall’s wire fit out. At station 9, the floor may be built. Teams in the factory can move to other production lines as and when necessary, so there is full employment of all the labour, and all skills available are efficiently utilised.
More value, more choice
Most customers, however, will be oblivious to all these production details. All they care about is that in just four months, they can take delivery of a pre-built, fully tested data centre that can be shipped to their premises, or hosted for them by Colt.
Just as customers ultimately shouldn’t worry how a PC is put together, as long as it has the performance and reliability they need, so it is with data centres. But worry they do when they own the problem of data centre construction. When they are involved in construction on their site they are inevitably drawn into decisions they should not have to get involved in. But Colt argues that you should no more build your own data centre than you build your own PCs.
Just as Dell gave PC buyers greater freedom of choice and more bang for their buck, Colt has changed the way data centre buyers configure their computing infrastructure. All the elements of a data centre can be brought together off site by experts who have been through this process many times. Colt has widened the choices available to customers, while somehow making the process simpler. Given that many data centre purchasers are not technical and need guiding through the process, this is a valuable achievement.
“We’ve been building data centres for 15 years, so we know what people want and we know how to make the process efficient and painless,” says Ruddock.
Production time for a data centre has been cut from 15 months to around four. Think how many meetings that saves you. Indeed, says Ruddock, that time could come down even further. “We’re learning things about production and making new efficiencies all the time,” he says. Partners even suggest ways to make further time savings – a sign that people are enthusing about the project and buying into this new way of working.

BOX 1.   Data Centre Types and how to spot them