Put storage to work

Data centre cost savings and optimization considerations, according to Berthold Birkelbach.

The global corporate and business environment has recently seen extremely difficult transitions where CEOs and other C-level executives have been forced to take stock of their company stability. In some cases survival like never before has been 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 reduce costs by optimising data centre environments, Schnabel offers a complement of core infrastructure and optimisation services for its customers. The internationally recognised portfolio covers 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 as well as certification through to network design and IT migration planning. They all meet international standards such as TIA-942, Uptime Institute and BICSI.

The focus by all clients and governments alike to conserve energy through the application of environmentally green and optimisation strategies has driven a focused effort and altered the deployment and design of generic building and data centres alike. With the advent of environmentally orientated standards, they are invoked and followed within existing buildings and through all new projects. Environmentally conscious technologies have become core drivers in the realisation of all sizes of projects. Schnabel has enabled all customers in benefiting from its existing long experience within the German market known for their high environmental quality standards. Schnabel has assisted all its customers in achieving data centre facilities that match all customer business drivers by leveraging the latest technologies in infrastructure design. 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. To ensure this capability, Schnabel 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 10 years or more. By concentrating on resource planning during feasibility studies, needs assessment and design, Schnabel customers 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.As such, Schnabel 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 co-operation 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 streamline procurement, supply chain and project deployment.

Schnabel 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 ageing country infrastructures. 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. This discussion will continue long into the future. A flexible design that is provided by Schnabel 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 became majority shareholder and CEO of Schnabel in 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.