Automation: Data Centres Are The Low Hanging Fruit

Braham Singh, COO - IDC & Associated Business, HGC Global Communications

Braham Singh, COO - IDC & Associated Business, HGC Global Communications

Visit a telecom facility or a data center, and the Network Operation Centre (NOC) tour is mandatory. Data Centers show off earnest young techies who stare intently at screens while we stare at them; then go back to playing Minecraft once we’re gone.

What happens when there is no NOC to show off? I recently visited an Etix Everywhere facility in Lille, France. Etix Everywhere has data centers across Western Europe, Africa, and Latin America. The facility in Lille is an edge data center. I am used to the big ones like the 80MW block of concrete we brought to market in New Mumbai over the course of my last job. However, in terms of high tech, the New Mumbai monolith was Stone Age compared to this wee, under half a megawatt facility in a small town, north of France.

For starters, there were no security personnel. You receive an email from Etix Everywhere’s NOC; you go online before the visit and download an RT image that is scanned at the gate. Forgot to do it? Just show an ID to the camera looking at you and the attached printer spewed out your RT identification to scan and be allowed in. Once inside the data center, the same RT image allows you into areas you are permitted and denies entry where you’re not.

All this time, not a single security guard anywhere. “None?” I asked my escort.

“None.” And being stymied for so many years by EU labor laws, there was this moment of guilty pleasure I tried not to savor.

Like power, connectivity is critical to any data center. Automated, software defined networks (sdns) like hgc’s, transform a centralized noc into the focal point for connectivity

I was told my tour was being managed from the NOC. But there would be no NOC tour because it was at Luxembourg a good three hundred and forty kilometers away. One central NOC, managing all of their data center spread across Western Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

Now to Asia where HGC is rapidly creating a connected data center cluster. The only way to stabilize so many mergers, acquisitions and builds is through similar automation and central command for operations and engineering. And as our friends in Europe show us, no more than a couple of facilities managers at each site.

The main challenge to automation is the mindset. I once had a head of IT advise against project management software and to use Excel and PowerPoint instead, because, “everything anyway needs to be converted to Excel.” Such a mindset amongst otherwise sophisticated colleagues and customers leads to interesting situations. In many cases, automated data centers employ on-site people in uniform to provide a sense of security to customers whose business is protected by a Central NOC somewhere else. In a few years, airlines may well employ pilots for the same reason.

Like power, connectivity is critical to any data center. Automated, Software Defined Networks (SDNs) like HGC’s, transform a centralized NOC into the focal point for connectivity. Whether a rack, power, or Internet-related issue, one can monitor and act. A data center resting on one’s fiber does very well as our own experience demonstrates. On-net is the magic word that reduces operating expenses, allowing that much more revenue to rain down on earnings. So does automation. No harm belabouring that point. As long as the associated capital investment doesn’t mess with your rate of return, automation invariably fattens the bottom line by reducing operating costs.

The question then arises, how do all this augur for the security people being replaced and the NOC employees not needed? Not well. This is the conundrum of our times, with machines now checking us out from supermarkets and checking us in to airplanes. I don’t have an answer other than to make sure our kids go STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) at school.