The beginning of 2015 sees the launch of a new distribution agreement between Finning UK and Ireland and Baselayer, a provider of modular data centre infrastructure.
The new agreement builds on Finning’s current offering within the data centre industry, which includes the supply of all aspects of equipment needed to meet the extreme demands for power reliability, such as generators, HV switchgear, power management, UPS and noise solutions.
By partnering with Baselayer, Finning can now distribute data centre modular technology wherever and whenever customers need it, indoors or outdoors, on or off the utility grid.
Here, Ian Wilcoxson, market sector manager – Data Centre Power Solutions at Finning provides some insight into the reasons behind the company’s move into modular data centre infrastructure.
Online access
At present, around 2.3 billion people are connected to the internet; that’s less than a third of the global population. As more and more people from developing countries continue to come online, existing data centre capacity will be tested.
Building more ‘traditional’ data centres may not necessarily be the answer as, when you consider the time taken to carry out site selection, negotiation, site preparation, construction and commissioning, it may be two years before the facility is actually up and running – by which time hundreds of millions of more people will have access to the internet.
In contrast, modular data centre solutions have quick timeframes from order to deployment. As a standardised solution, they are manufactured and able to be ordered, customised and delivered to the data centre site in a matter of months, or even weeks.
Unlike a traditional data centre design, modular data centres can evolve with technology and provide the correct amount of resiliency as required by the application. The highly efficient modules also provide lower operational costs, with traditional data centres being approximately five times more expensive to operate over a 20-year lifetime.
Being able to build a data centre environment quickly doesn’t only revolve around the ability to scale. Being agile with data centre platforms means being able to respond to the needs of an evolving business. Whether that means providing a new service or reducing downtime — modular data centres are directly designed around business and infrastructure agility. Where some organisations build their modular environment for the purposes of capacity planning, other organisations build modular data centres with highly effecitve disaster recovery operations in mind.
Partnership with Baselayer
By partnering with Baselayer, Finning is now able to offer data centre modules, which are built using lean manufacturing principles and integrated with a robust DCIM tool to deliver visibility and control. This combination enables companies to deploy a data centre at any location and analyse performance metrics across the entire infrastructure and IT equipment.
The Baselayer offering from Finning is split into three product lines.
Core line
The CORE line of products is engineered for resiliency and scalability, with fast deployment, and can be provisioned to match application redundancy requirements.
Edge line
With its compact footprint designed to enable latency sensitive applications to be deployed discretely in proximity to the end-user, the EDGE line of products allows data centre capacity to be distributed wherever it’s needed.
Eco line
The Eco line enables free air-cooling to reduce operational expense without sacrificing performance or resiliency.
As the UK & Ireland’s distributor for Baselayer, Finning can also provide feasibility studies, install and commissioning, as well as ongoing maintenance and support.
European Code of Conduct
Finning has recently been appointed as an Endorser of the European Code of Conduct on data centres. The Code of Conduct has been created in response to increasing energy consumption in data centres and the need to reduce the related environmental, economic and energy supply security impacts.
The aim is to inform and stimulate data centre operators and owners to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner without hampering the mission critical function of data centres. The Code of Conduct aims to achieve this by improving understanding of energy demand within the data centre, raising awareness, and recommending energy efficient best practice and targets.
The Code of Conduct is a voluntary initiative aimed to bring interested stakeholders together, including the coordination of other similar activities by manufacturers, vendors, consultants and utilities.
As an Endorser of the Code of Conduct, Finning will be expected to support and implement energy efficiency within the data centre market.
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