Inside Colt's modular co-location datacentre

The entrance to the new, modular data halls

Over the coming year, ZDNet UK is visiting a variety of datacentres to get a behind-the-scenes look at the range of approaches being taken to meet the demand for data handling. In March, we visited the Colt modular datacentre, which is part of London 3, a much larger legacy Colt site in Welwyn Garden City.

Colt operates 19 datacentres across Europe providing co-location and managed infrastructure services to a variety of businesses.

With around over 1,000 racks spread across 100,000 square feet of IT space, and with an aggregate power drawdown of 33MVA, London 3 is one of Colt's most important datacentres. It represents six percent of the co-location provider's datacentre capacity in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

For this reason, Colt has chosen the site as a flagship for its new modular hall design for datacentres. The design method is based around minimising the amount of time it takes to construct a datacentre and is being touted by Colt's director of datacentre infrastructure services, Guy Ruddock, as the way of the future.

ZDNet UK visited the site's two modular datacentres, data halls 3 and 4. Pictured is an empty, unracked module.

"In three to five years, if you're building a bespoke datacentre, [you'll] be told you're mad," he said. "There's nobody near us."

The manufacture and testing of the modules is done by Colt, before being shipped to the customer site. Colt has patents pending for its datacentre modules. Ruddock said the company has developed a design of the module that cuts the time it takes for it to be installed on site, but would not elaborate when asked for further details.

Photo credit: Jack Clark

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See more of the datacentre tour on ZDNet UK.