Why system-wide resilience is crucial for colocation providers

Schneider Electric - Delivering high-reliability data centre operations is vital to cloud and colocation service providers. This is hardly surprising, considering how service quality is typically seen as a crucial factor for them to achieve growth and profitability. However, attaining high service quality standards isn't as straightforward as it sounds.

As explained by Mark Bidinger of Schneider Electric, a quality UPS might work flawlessly out of the box.

Deployed in a production environment, entropy immediately comes into play and reliability in the field becomes less certain. Moreover, delivering the right service quality level not only requires associated equipment to work well together but must also be regularly serviced and maintained for longevity.

Ensuring service quality

This is the reason expert knowledge in areas such as energy efficiency, sustainability and building management matters to customers, according to Selena Nimerick, who is Schneider Electric's VP of Customer Satisfaction & Quality at its Secure Power Division in Singapore. Paired with highly reliable equipment, being able to connect the dots in these areas is what brings colocation business resilience to a new level, she notes.

The knowledge can help colocation providers save money too, by opening doors to intelligence in areas such as power consumption that colocation providers would otherwise not have access to.

"Data centres are huge consumers of energy. By consolidating our massive collection of product behaviour field data, we can address such challenges through optimization that simultaneously boosts systems uptime while reducing overall energy consumption by up to 30 per cent," she said.

Servicing colocation providers well takes a special touch. In most cases, the preference is for a single point of contact within the quality organisation. Precision matters when it comes to delivery timelines of products and solutions. By providing accurate lead times, partners make it much easier for colocation providers to plan projects and support the needs and requirements of their customers.

Constantly improving

To help colocation providers further enhance the reliability of their systems, the partner can help by sharing reliability metrics. With as many as hundreds of products within a single colocation installation, component failures matter and can significantly impact the trust of customers.

For a start, this data can give colocation providers the confidence that the solutions they have deployed are dependable and predictable. Of course, the onus is on the partner to invest in reliability reviews and to work with internal teams to constantly improve system-wide reliability - even when paired with solutions from other brands.

"Beyond constantly improving the reliability of our products, we also work hard to ensure that our equipment integrates well with the other equipment on their site. By developing a deep understanding of their third-party equipment, we are in a better position to support them with any challenges they face," said Nimerick.

The age of digitalisation means that no one organisation can do it alone. This is where a global partnership of system integrator, consultants, and software developers can work together to deliver holistic, comprehensive solutions for the system-wide resilience that colocation providers need. When everything is in place, the result is a unique, tailored experience that makes for a far smoother journey.