Are we ever going to hit limits with our data centres?

It is no coincidence that large international providers like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are building so-called “hyperscale” data centres all over the world - and even planning to power them with their own mini-nuclear plants. Based on developments like these, you might suspect that parties like Previder will run into a limit. I want to allay that concern immediately: that is not the case.

Enough physical capacity

Previder once started as a local provider in Hengelo, but we now have several branches in the Netherlands. Our data centres are far from full, and we continue to expand our capacity through acquisitions. In addition, advancing technology is creating more and more computing power per square metre. Just look at your own smartphone: it probably has hundreds of times more computing power than a PC from the 1990s, and with a much smaller device. Similarly, the capacity per rack in a data centre continues to grow. Moreover, chip manufacturers are making their chips smarter and smarter, so they can still deliver the same performance with less computing power.

Doing more with fewer people

A limit that might be in sight even sooner than the physical one is the capacity of “hands”. Good employees are scarce, especially in our industry. Fortunately, we have more and more smart solutions to automate away manual work. For instance, we recently rolled out a completely new environment at a customer's site. That was a job that used to take a week, with a lot of man-hours. Now we scripted the entire migration in advance using Kubernetes. That approach ensured that the new environment was up and running within an hour. An added advantage of this approach is that we ensure quality by minimising the human failure factor.

Another way of making the most effective use of available people and resources is to standardise our solutions and working methods. This gives us the flexibility, for example, to deploy all our employees on projects, regardless of which branch they work at. And just like automation, standardisation ensures that we always deliver the same reliable quality. Furthermore, we increasingly offer our customers a self-service portal that allows them to easily carry out many actions themselves, without using our employees. And AI can also help us do more work with the same number of people, for instance by monitoring systems and using advanced chatbots to adequately answer customer questions.

Our data centres

Will power supply then become an issue?

A major factor where there are also limits is power supply. In a city like Amsterdam, this is already starting to become a problem. Due to overloaded infrastructure, data centres there often cannot get enough power to use their entire rack capacity. Fortunately, this issue does not occur in our case. In fact, forecasts show that there is still plenty of room for growth in the coming period.

Innovative solutions for cooling

The increasing processing power of computers is generating more and more heat in data centres. Previder is anticipating this by, for example, providing facilities for water cooling instead of cooling with air. We are also coming up with innovative solutions. In Hengelo, for example, we have a collaboration with NX Filtration, one of our “neighbouring” companies. From our data centre, we send liquid with a temperature of 24 degrees to NX Filtration via a closed system, where it is used for heating. NX Filtration then sends the liquid cooled to 12 degrees back to Previder, where we use it again to cool the server rooms.

Solutions with future

To come back to the question in the title of this blog: you don't have to worry about possibly reaching limits at Previder. Sure, there are challenges, but we provide effective solutions with a future. The fact that we can do this is also due to the fact that we are a rapidly growing organisation with around 700 employees. Our volume gives us the power to invest and keep up with technology. In short, you can confidently entrust your crown jewels to us.

Would you like to know more?

Are you curious about how Previder as an IT partner can help your company or organisation further, today and tomorrow? Feel free to contact us for a no-obligation introduction.