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Colt loads up factory-built data centres

Pre-fab... is fab

Colt has claimed it can supply factory-built, 500m2 Modular Data Centre internal hall buildings for installation in warehouse-type sheds at a faster speed and lower cost than new-build data centres.

These are not shipping container datacentres, which are 40ft long and 8ft wide and only have a 320ft2 (29.7m2) floorspace. You could get 16 of those into one of these Colt turnkey halls.

Colt, a telecoms supplier, says each turnkey modular datacentre includes all necessary power and cooling elements, and is is constructed and tested using modern component-based production line techniques in a Colt-approved manufacturing facility before being shipped to site in pieces and assembled on the spot.

The site could be a customer one or a Colt managed data centre. Customers can scale up their data centre by adding more Colt modules, either alongside each other or double-stacked.

A module takes four months from purchase to commissioning on site, compared to nine months or so for a conventional build. We understand a conventional build could cost €13,000m2 and the Colt modules will be less than this.

Costing is based on kilowatts rather than the floorspace. A range of power and cooling options are available, with the minimum base configuration capable of 750kW power and 1500W/m2 power density for a 500m2 hall.

The company has formed a new division, Colt Data Centre Services (Colt DCS), to do this, managed by Akber Joffer. It's keen to tell us that it's not new to the data centre game, currently operating 19 data centres and managing over 21,000m2 of data centre space across Europe.

It is building out further space and power capacity at its existing Paris 2 site to house some new modular data halls.

Colt CEO Rakesh Bhasin said the new modular halls will substantially reduce "deployment times as well as helping [customers] to minimise the environmental and cost impacts associated with the consumption of power". These are not buildings in the traditional sense and do not carry a BREEAM rating. The modules have a design target PUE (Power Usage Efficiency) rating of 1.21.

Apparently there is a customer using one of Colt's new halls but the name hasn't been released. One advantage of the new halls is that they won't necessarily be as tightly-packed with kit as the containerised data centres. ®

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