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The current volatile economic climate puts increasing demands on businesses to reduce capital and operational expenditure, while making it difficult for CIOs to accurately predict how much and what kind of data centre capacity they will need in ten or fifteen years’ time. Many companies aren’t in the growth position they predicted and are paying for unused capacity. In these instances while the data centre is at low load (15%) businesses can pay up to 40%* of the operational costs, just to keep their data centre running, when the IT load does not achieve the forecast.

To meet the demands of a changing landscape, flexibility both in the design phase and throughout the life cycle is put at the heart of the Colt ftec data centre. It builds on the design options of the Colt modular data centre announced last year, adding dynamic flexible options that can be implemented throughout the lifecycle of the data centre, without having to take it offline. There are 3 core considerations for any datacentre: power, cooling and space. Colt ftec introduces dynamic flexibility to each of these elements to reduce forecasting risk and reduce total cost of ownership.

The 500m2 Colt ftec data centres with powerflex technology can now scale from 500 kW to 1000 kW to 1500 kW dynamically, without loss of service. In a business growth scenario, capacity demand can quickly spike. For example a CIO may require 1000W/m2 now, but will know that there is potentially a need for higher density in the future. Colt ftec powerflex gives the option to provision for 1000W/m2 now and upgrade anytime in the future without any downtime, at a fraction of the cost of building a new data centre. This will reduce the total cost per kilowatt and enable delivery of up to 3 times more power to the data centre.

Colts coolflex technology is scalable to meet changing cooling demands with changing power without any downtime. Should the compute power required remain lower than expected, the cooling can be dynamically altered to run at peak efficiencies, resulting in considerable operational savings over the life of the data centre. Colt’s coolflex delivers a variety of cooling options in design phase too, including fresh air only, DX only, indirect, mixed mode or chilled water cooling.

The Colt spaceflex technology provides flexibility in the layout and building to maximise the space and footprint. It will allow the customer to change and mix the densities within the data centre both at design phase and while the data centre is live. To support this the reinforced flooring allows heavier equipment for higher density compute to be moved in at any time. The Colt ftec data centre has a number of design phase features, such as the option of single or double levels without the need for extensive building works. It is also available with fully weatherproofed cladding, negating the need for a shell building. It provides internal space flexibility with contiguous space of 125-500m2, multiple rack layouts and hot aisle containment – enabling maximum effective use of available space.