The measure of a data centre

PART 2

Marcus Take the same approach you do with your mobile phone bill. There’s two or three specialist organisations out there who will actually run your bill through a piece of software and tell you (a) have you met the contract, have you been over or under charged, and (b) comparing that with Telstra and with Optus or Virgin or whatever. You should be able to do the same thing with your data centre. Find out what’s my cost per transaction? What’s my cost per megawatt? What’s my cost per square metre, or per hour or year?

The bizarre thing as a reseller is if you take that consulting level approach, the vendors actually start coming to you as a destination. They’ll go ‘I’ve got a really complex sale, I’m working for someone who can act as a consultant, to help me close this transaction or sale’. And it could be the Schneider guys are sitting there trying to do X megawatts of power, but if they need that advisory services bit to close the deal, they are going to go to the reseller who has those advisory services. 

They’re not going to go to the reseller and go ‘yeah, it’s part No. APC 123’…. Because anyone can do the transactional sale, and to actually sit there and do the added value and bring in the software component, bring in the analyst estimate but actually have the government’s role as you transition from service A to service B, whether that’s insource or outsource or multi source is irrelevant, you are going back to the metrics, but create yourself as a reseller, create yourself as a destination to clients, and for the vendors. 

A classic example is the wireless industry, wi-fi. Everyone’s got it at home, you chuck it up and you get an intermittent service, it’s not reliable. If you put it in an enterprise context, there’s two or three specialist advisory companies who are the enterprise great whites, and the vendors go to them and outsource their advisory services to those guys. We should be looking at the same situation where the vendors are saying ‘here’s a specialist organisation, they’ve got the IP, the analytics, the business processing and consulting skills to help me close this deal’ and you’ll get business coming to you.

Trevor We worked through a fairly large university recently that had struggled for two years with its DR process, because in the end when they were swapping failing across to DR, and the facility was outsourced, their facility couldn’t cope with the power requirements and probably they went on and took down other production servers and took down other DR sites purely because of the workload.

So that advisory capacity that Marcus is talking about, I really think a lot of sales people take the easy road and say ‘yes’ all the time to customers, whereas when you stand back and ask them to articulate why they’re formulating their strategies, and then you can convince them to broaden their scope, there’s two things that happen. A lot of people don’t like to give away free advice, because they think they’ll then act on it, but for me if it’s a government agency or a large corporate, the reality is they’re going to hunt around for three competitive quotes or two competitive quotes.  

That’s articulating up the tree to the CFO and to the CEO and being more aware of what the total costs of running their business are and making the line to generate more income to through the cost of operation. You set yourself aside from all the others that are doing materially, your sales cycle has probably taken a little bit longer, but once you’ve secured that business relationship then all the other sales cycles you have will be a longer relationship with your client and they will probably more likely ask for advice in other areas, and advice is way more margin, they’ll pay for more for your IP than they’ll pay for product.

Greg From my experience, a lot of those sales people in that area do a wonderful job in turning a $2 million sale into a $200,000 sale, because they don’t actually see the problem at hand, they just see what the person’s asking for. 

The most wonderful thing you can always ask is why – and we always ask why, what is the drive behind things. At the end of the day, all the data centre stuff and all the IT, it has to become closer, but it’s a solution for a particular problem.

But if you don’t understand the problem you won’t be able to match a solution and that’s why the high sophistication and the high level of skills that haven’t, you know business has been very, very easy for many years for a lot of people, but now people have to differentiate. What Trevor and Marcus have said is spot on, you have to get a little bit more sophisticated and understand the end-to-end from where the power enters the building to where the computing power is delivered, all the way through and if you understand all that, and the business requirements of the client, then you’ll have a unique insight. But you can only do that if you invest the time in getting to know the client and understanding their problems. You know the famous solution sales line, is ‘what keeps them up at night?’ and that’s what you need to know.

Jacques We are talking about that data centre life cycle and we are talking about your plan and you analyse what the need is, and usually it starts with application. Someone wants an application to be running, so we’ve got an example now that because people don’t plan, analyse and actually monitor what they’ve got into their data centre, they don’t know how much server power they’ve got.

You’ve got rack number one going at 2 kilowatts and suddenly there’s a cyclone in Darwin and that rack number one goes up to 8 kilowatt density and you can’t do that if you haven’t planned for this. We found a few weeks ago a client using their DR  centre to run an application the board wanted, so the DR  is not the DR any more, it’s a data centre. And because the original data centre hasn’t been well planned and the people who design it didn’t really forecast for that data centre life cycle.

We saw in a study tour people at the IBM Innovation Centre telling us that their server is going from 65 degrees Celsius coming out of the server. Someone asked ‘how do you plan to cool that?’ and a guy said ‘I’ve got to bring liquid cooling straight into the server’.  Now if you’re centre hasn’t been planned what do you do? You move your application to your recovery centre, and that’s all, that’s what we do. We tell people to plan ahead and then stop to think and then think about the future.

Trevor has a challenge like this, and Marcus also has challenge and Jason has frustration where you can see all that space and the problem can be solved just by doing best practice. Everyone needs to stop and think and find that space, that’s what we want to tell to the resellers – they might be missing the opportunity to sell a server just like Greg said –  turn a $2 million sale into $200,000 sale - because they don’t do the full life cycle.

Paul Who knows what a data centre’s going to look like in 15 years’ time. IT is changing rapidly and very frequently, but I think the job is to give clients a fighting chance to be as efficient as possible, to be able to react to these changes.

And the only way to do that is through building a modular type deployment of a data centre where you can reconfigure, you can redeploy, you can scale up or scale down and then you will avoid having data centres where the DR site has become a data centre or some I see as I go around, nice big spaces and they look empty and you’ve got racks with individual servers in and loads and loads of space, and they can’t put any more in the data centre, because they can’t get enough power and they can’t get enough cooling into that space, and it’s about monitoring measurement, enabling one to be nimble for the future.