Data centre

No ‘yellow pack’ data centres

Blogs
(Image: Stockfresh)

22 November 2013

At the recent EMC Forum, I had a chance to catch up with an industry veteran of long experience in the service provider and data centre sides of the industry.

As we caught up, we discussed the data centre landscape in Ireland, and an observation emerged, for which, at the time, neither of us had an explanation.

The observation was around the fact that the burgeoning data centre industry here, characterised as it is by cutting edge technologies in facilities that have impressive efficiency ratings and more, seems to be mostly based around custom workloads and not web scale deployments.

Despite the fact that every new data centre trumpets its ability to exploit our clement climate with all the savings that free cooling bring, there does not appear to be a rush to site the kind of data centre here that supports the Amazons and others that have uniform workloads that require more scale than anything else.

A good example is the recent opening of the Dataplex facility in Ballycoolin, west Dublin. The €23 million investment claimed to result in an industry leading PUE of 1.25. Although, I am assured that is likely to be bettered very soon with the opening of another facility in the south of the city.

The Dataplex example is fairly typical as it details the power, security, capacity and support advantages that come with siting in Ireland, allowing it to compete for business globally. Indeed, an anchor tenant was Continent 8, whose CEO Michael Tobin said at that of the nine sites it has around the world, the Dataplex B10 facility in Dublin was the most technologically advanced.

So, why then, with all these inherent advantages, do we not see the likes of Amazon not covering half a county with a data centre?

That’s a good question, but to make an analogy with another sector, manufacturing, it may not be a bad thing.

In the past, we have seen many general manufacturing businesses go out of business as costs rose and other lower cost environments became more attractive. What has remained tended to be specialist businesses, such as medical devices and the like that required a more skilled workforce, greater resources and investment.

Could it be argued that Ireland is attracting the higher value end of the data centre market because we have a better skill base and potential workforce to be able to provide services and support around data centre services?

That may well be the case.

As with Dell, whose just-in-time manufacturing went to Poland but whose professional services and solutions centre remained here, are companies that provide services based on data centres here catering to a more sophisticated set of needs?

It may well be that data centre companies, such as Dataplex and Interxion see Ireland as being able to support the more demanding end of the data centre business, which, when combined with the climate, cultural, political and economic conditions, makes siting here an attractive prospect.

Having ruminated on the observation for a while, that is certainly my impression. But I’d be open to suggestions from others in the industry and beyond as to why Ireland on the data centre front seems to be in the premium space, as opposed to the ‘yellow pack’ bin.

Use the comment facility below to let me know what you think, and we’ll see what titbits of tech we can find for the best response.

 


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie