Datacenter cost savings & optimization considerations

The global corporate and business environment has recently seen extremely difficult transitions where CEOs and other C level executives have been caused to take stock of their company stability and in some cases survival like never before encountered. Schnabel has taken this opportunity of offering assistance to Corporations around the world in supporting their greatest business asset: Safety and availability of Company data.

In order to assist companies in reducing costs by optimising their data centre environments, Schnabel AG has developed a complement of core infrastructure and newly developed optimisation services for its customers. Directed from their German head quarters in Frankfurt, over 100 specialised data centre consultants seek to offer all prospective and existing clients an internationally recognised portfolio. The services cover all aspects of data centre requirements from Business Case Feasibility Studies, Facility Audits, Detailed Design and Tendering Services, Implementation Quality Assurance and Project Management - concluding with testing and handover - and Certification through to Network Design and IT Migration Planning. They all together meet international recognised standards such as TIA-942, Uptime Institute and BICSI and many others. Schnabel AG offers every customer a single point of contact for any requirements within their data centre in order to guarantee a quality service considering regional aspects but providing high international standards.

There has been an overwhelmingly drive to conserve energy through the application of environmentally green and optimisation strategies. This focus by all clients and governments alike has driven a focused effort and altered the deployment and design of generic building and data centres alike. With the advent of LEED and other environmentally orientated standards, it has now become a business driver and sometimes even a KPI for enterprises to ensure that standards are invoked and followed within existing buildings and through all new and prospective projects. This governmentally driven insurance of higher building efficiency and utility deployment has had a knock-on effect to the design and implementation of data centres. Environmentally conscious technologies have become core drivers in the realisation of all sizes of project. “Schnabel AG has enabled all customers in benefiting from its existing long experience within the German market known for their high environmental quality standards” points out Berthold Birkelbach, CEO, the advantege which Schnabel customers enjoy.

Schnabel AG has experienced a huge increase in the deployment of consolidation strategies by its customers within the Middle East. In this region it has become necessary to break the ceiling of normalised power and cooling data centre standards and move into increased load within much smaller foot prints. This drive comes from both cost and resource restrictions but offers additional environmental benefits through the reduction in facility size. Schnabel AG has assisted all its customers in achieving data centre facilities that match all customer business drivers by leveraging the latest technologies in infrastructure design. In some cases customer expectations are exceeded. Schnabel’s ability to work with clients in establishing design parameters based on business drivers and international standards enables the deployment of data centres. These become both future proof and in some cases expansion proof with the advent of new modular and technologically advanced designs.

Currently, data centres all require huge amounts of both manpower and software/hardware resources in order to maintain stability and reliability. This focus on sustainable and resilient infrastructures can only be attained through adopting effective capacity planning so that facilities offer the correct resources for all current and future IT requirements. To further ensure this capability, Schnabel AG has gained authority on creating expandable infrastructures within its designs. This ability to allow and incorporate phased capacity and expansion capabilities for future technologies, enables customers to rely on their facility resource availability for ten years or more. Managing the discord between new higher heat loads and physical rack requirements guarantees customers the benefit to balance IT infrastructure and business growth. By concentrating on resource planning during feasibility studies, needs assessment and design, Schnabel AG customer command full authority over their once segmented or mismanaged infrastructure capabilities.
 
With the drive for reduced costs under shrinking budgets and global financial pressures, data centre managers have a vested interest in lowering the operational costs of any existing data centre facility. This ensures that the entire business benefits as a whole. This requirement for more articulate enterprise orientated planning is now becoming the core of all business based decisions requiring the ability to deploy required utilities in advance. As such Schnabel AG has seen a drive by many customers to involve all departments during decision making in order to plan and realise effective and secure IT investment decisions. “This drive for cooperation and increased communication between upper, middle and lower management is today enabling a greater visualisation for all enterprises and benefiting customers alike in order to stream line procurement, supply chain and project deployment” explains Damion Lock, Commercial Director of the Schnabel Dubai office, the emphasis Schnabel lays on communicationg with its customers.

Based on projects across the Middle East, Schnabel AG has experienced similar problems in each and every country when it comes to planning data centre facilities.  In most cases, the ability to match power requirements with availability is a difficult equation to balance due to the aging country infrastructures. In some cases the available power is running on old or outdated equipment which require upgrading in order to maintain a high reliability. This reliance on power has led the region to now consider alternative power generation technologies including the recent forum on Nuclear power held in Abu Dhabi. The push for greener, more environmentally friendly technologies has driven the regional authorities to redefine their approach to power and compensate for the increase in data centres can only exacerbate the situation. To this end, there comes a point where the appetite for power within a data centre can contradict some of the newer drives to become environmentally friendly due to the fact that a requirement to reduce consumption can clash with the need for redundancy and reliability. The push to provide the business with N+1 or even S+S reliable systems can lead to a huge increase in power when senior management are looking to reduce costs and drive for compliance with environmental standards such as LEED. This discussion will continue long into the future. A flexible design which is provided by Schnabel AG will guide the customer on their way to attain well balanced and technologically superior data centre facilities. Our slogan is our challenge: Nobody does it better!

Berthold Birkelbach (Schnabel AG - CEO)
Berthold Birkelbach joined SCHNABEL AG in 2005 and became its majority shareholder and CEO in May 2006. After completing his training as a telecommunications technician and earning a degree in public administration, he joined the property management department of Deutsche Telekom AG, taking on his first management roles with DeTeImmobilien. He was partner and on the management board of 4Competence, a facility management company, at its launch in 2003 before becoming a partner and CEO in 2004.

Damion Lock (Schnabel AG - GM Middle East)
After starting with Schnabel in 2006 as a Project Manager and developing several projects for the Dubai office, Damion Lock moved into the role of Commercial Director in 2008 and now runs the office covering the whole Middle East region. Having worked on mainframes, servers and software for many years, he brings over 17 years experience in Data Centers, comprising of 14 years of IT and 3 years of DC infrastructure gained mostly in the Middle East region where he has lived and worked for over 14 years. Gaining experience from an IBM reseller in 1991, he moved to the Middle East in 1995 where he started work as an engineer in Saudi Arabia moving quickly up to Kuwait after one year. There he started to gain further knowledge becoming responsible for ISO9001 and developing new skills in customer development. After a short stay in Bahrain he finally settled in Dubai in 2001 developing the VMware market in the role of Business Development Manager in 2005.