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Terrorism, floods and the DIY data centre

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Gary Flood ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 15 Feb 2008 11:44 GMT

...it would not be able to drive sufficient volts there for three years. This is where a specialist company such as Digital Realty can win big. "We wanted to work with a company with track record in getting this done and which had already lined up all the relationships to make it happen," says Adorni.

He also rated the company's technical competence; Digital was able to talk to him about DRUPS (Diesel Rotary Uninterruptible Power Supply kit), now being used much more commonly in Europe than the US, which Adorni wanted in the new facility.

Will other organisations take HSBC's lead here and build their own 21st-century data centres from scratch, instead of retooling their existing sites or going down the co-lo road? Digital Realty claims there is growing interest from European-based organisations for just this kind of service. Active since 2001, the company has so far set up and is operating 12 million-square-foot-worth of client data-centre space so far.

Although the company's business is overwhelmingly outside the UK at the moment, that seems set to change. In November it released market research, carried out by independent number crunchers Campos Research & Analysis, suggesting that over 80 percent of respondents plan to expand their data centres.

Given the environmental, security and pricing issues in the London market, we anticipate demand for our specialist expertise to increase

Chris Crosby, Digital Realty Trust

The average size of expansions respondents talked about was 10,000 square feet (1,000 square metres), but three-quarters of all respondents claimed to be looking to expand to data centres with more like 5,000 to 25,000 square feet (500 to 2,500 square metres).

The majority (85 percent) want to do so within the next 12 months, or two years at most — and 79 percent of that figure plan to expand in two or more locations, suggesting such expansion will be in the form of multi-site data-centre renewal initiatives. The sample was of 125 senior IT decision makers in a range of medium-sized to large firms across Europe.

The reasons for all this new real estate tend to chime with the HSBC drivers: disaster recovery and business continuity, plus a desire for extra network connectivity, upgraded cooling capacity, more raised floor area, extra power, and new applications, all of which are high on the must-have list for these planners.

"For some companies, only a completely dedicated infrastructure in a data centre will suit," says Digital Realty UK head of operations Chris Crosby, who doubles as senior vice president of sales and technical services for the firm. "This kind of company doesn't want to share equipment and generators. And given the environmental, security and pricing issues in the London market, we anticipate demand for our specialist expertise to increase."

This is still a minority market; no analyst company as yet tracks custom-built data-centre construction and operation as a separate market, tending to lump it in with generic co-location. And given the cost and time commitments, only the biggest companies — with the biggest data-centre issues — are likely to work with firms such as Digital Realty. After all, the clue's in the name: it can't be often IT meets the real-estate business. "For many people that combination is indeed a tough one to handle," admits Crosby.