Picture the scene, you’ve decided it’s time for a getaway, so you pick your location and set about choosing the perfect accommodation. ‘Is it clean? Is there a pool? Close enough to all the main attractions? Is breakfast included?’ Just a few of the questions you might ask yourself as you scroll through a seemingly endless array of options. But it’s not just about the amenities, it’s about the service, too. You start reading through reviews from other patrons, and eventually, you stumble across something just right.

It is the ticking of those boxes, combined with five-star service, both on paper and in practice that can make or break a business, and it is no different in the colocation (AKA colo) data center space. Existing to serve, it is the job of colocation providers to meet the exacting needs of their tenants, so it stands to reason that competition has always been fierce across the sector, with the proliferation of AI and other high-density workloads only serving to further up the ante.

To find out more about AI’s impact on the colo sector, DCD sat down with David Haynes, account manager for colocation at Rittal, a world-leading systems provider for enclosures, power distribution, climate control, IT infrastructure, 19-inch racks, software and services.

“The IT industry just keeps evolving,” attests Haynes. “As it does, customer expectations and priorities are evolving and changing along with it.”

Although speed to market will always be a top of the agenda for any data center customer, with the plethora of high-density applications being hosted today, as well as the unknown workloads of tomorrow, flexibility and versatility are critical to success in a modern day colocation environment, as tenants look to scale up alongside the needs of their respective businesses.

Big changes, big challenges

“The IT industry is going through some big changes and equally big challenges with AI in particular. Power availability is a huge roadblock to future expansion in terms of whether a facility can support this technology from a power and cooling perspective.”

With many areas – particularly in the US – contending with limited power infrastructure and transmission line constraints, power being a ‘big’ challenge may well be an understatement. As for cooling, the transition from CPU to GPU for high-density workloads means more components are packed into the same footprint. This not only equates to more heat, which existing cooling systems may struggle to handle both literally and figuratively, but ensures every square foot of a facility comes at a premium.

With this in mind, many enterprise data centers are now looking to colocation to provide the high level of power, cooling and space demanded by AI, so as not to impact their own facilities. This puts colocation providers in a bit of a predicament, where they either upgrade their offering to accommodate these new requirements, or lose out to the competition because they are unable to accept AI clients.

Ticking the boxes

To keep up with market demands, when it comes to upgrading equipment for the AI era and beyond, colocation facilities are facing challenges of their own. Long deployment cycles impacting speed to market, limited product availability, lack of standardization, demanding installations, energy inefficiency and accessory incompatibility are just a few of the roadblocks to the highly-redundant, reliable infrastructure both present and prospective clients are looking for.

From off-the-shelf solutions to a specific rack just for the colocation space in the form of the TS IT Colo, thankfully, Rittal has both the products and the expertise to support colocation providers at any stage of the data center lifecycle, with end-to-end solutions designed to help optimize business.

Readily available, the TS IT Colo can be effortlessly integrated into any colocation facility, boasting a standardized, modular design, simplifying the process of pairing the IT enclosure with the ideal accessories and spare components, mitigating any incompatibility issues.

“For us, standardization is huge,” says Haynes. “We know what our customers are expecting and can provide them with that consistency. Standardization also helps our factory, if we standardize our own products, it not only helps the efficiency of our manufacturing facility, but the efficiency of our emissions monitoring, and most importantly the customer gets an identical, high-quality product each and every time.”

With manufacturing sites all around the world, Rittal delivers this consistency on a global scale. A customer in Europe can expect the exact same service and quality as a customer located in the States, all without the risk of vendor lock-in, due to the agnostic nature of Rittal’s solutions.

“We provide that consistency with the same product all across the world. For example, you can buy an enclosure from the US, I can take a door that was made in the UK, I can take a side wall that we built in Germany, and all these components will fit, as well as support and play nice with our competition. Also with some very large global accounts we have multiple production sites which positively impacts our supply chain.”

Engineered to simplify the installation of IT components, the TS IT Colo also reduces the time, resources and tooling required for enclosure configuration and customization, based on variables such as server rack density or cooling requirements. Moreover, this allows for greater flexibility within the cabinet to support the highest cable and component installation densities, empowering colocation providers to simplify scalability by leveraging the more efficient, powerful compute AI requires.

In terms of lead times, these too are standardized, ensuring speed to market isn’t an issue:

“Once an order is received it’s shipping the same or next day from our factory in Ohio, or from one of our many distribution sites across the country,” Haynes affirms. “We also offer a primeXpress simple-to-order program, that allows us to configure standard enclosures at our factory to help reduce on-site installation cost for those companies that are in a construction phase.”

If you’re not actually sure which boxes need ticking, Rittal has you covered there, too. Uncertainty in this unprecedented AI era is one of the few things we can be certain of, therefore Rittal works closely with its customers to ensure they make informed decisions and get the most out of any investment they choose to make.

“When we meet with our customers we want to make sure we understand what it is they’re trying to do, what is going inside of the enclosures and where everything is going to be located. We need to talk through this so we can help them get these decisions right. If we fully understand what they’re trying to accomplish, it helps us make sure we recommend the correct solutions to meet their goals.”

Collaboration is key

You of course can’t create solutions to problems you don’t understand, which is why the benefit of experience cannot be understated. When it comes to evolutions in the IT space, this isn’t Rittal’s first rodeo, so looking at new technologies and challenges is nothing new. But even an industry veteran like Rittal – a bonafide member of the OCP complete with OCP lead designer status in rack and power, an extensive R&D team, ASHRAE involvement and over 60 years of experience – knows how integral collaboration is to success.

“We collaborate with our customers and we listen to the marketplace,” says Haynes. “We work with those that are actually driving this industry to develop new standards, to ensure we are designing solutions to provide not only the flexibility to support today's technologies, but help us shape what that next-generation of technology is going to look like.”

It was in fact Rittal’s Xpress program that catalyzed the creation of the TS IT Colo into an off the shelf standard solution, after patterns emerged in the configurations favored by their colocation customers.

“We realized there were commonalities. As a result, we now offer five different sizes so we can ensure they’re in stock and ready to go. They all include a combination handle front and rear, air baffles to help with airflow, cable management, as well as offering additional PDU brackets and partition wall bang kits. This was all very common among all of our colo customers.”

With the availability of multiple accessories, Rittal also enables its customers to add additional cabling options, further enhancing that flexibility with PDU placement anywhere inside the enclosure. But the importance of flexibility isn’t a bandwagon Rittal has simply found itself on in the advent of the AI boom, it’s something the company has baked into its solutions from day one.

“An enclosure that we sold 10 years ago, or even longer than that, we could simply modify to support AI, to support our DLC solution, our CDU solution. We can take our NEMA 12 edge solution and convert it to a traditional IT enclosure, or vice versa,” explains Haynes.

Optimizing your investment

Ensuring colo providers – or any data center customer for that matter – get the most out of their investment all starts at the beginning, and circles back to collaboration. Rittal makes it its mission to fully understand the application, how its products are going to be used and what’s going in them. This not only equates to the right solution being selected for the task at hand, but enables Rittal to recommend appropriate security measures and/or monitoring systems to both protect and prolong the lifespan of the product.

“We have a full line of what we call the CMC monitoring system,” says Haynes. “We monitor many points inside the data center: temperature, humidity, leak detection, vandalism detection, and door status, to name a few. We also provide access control for additional security via electronic handles that can be tied back into our own CMC system, or to a third-party access control system.”

Haynes goes on to highlight the importance of seeing that customers understand what they have purchased, the benefits, and how to use it to its full potential, bringing an educational element to Rittal’s offering. After all, the best monitoring system in the world is no good to anyone if they don’t know how to use it.

Five-star service from end-to-end

The service customers can expect from Rittal doesn’t end at ‘end-to-end’ solutions, or post-sale, it ends if and when the customer needs it to.

“Once somebody has purchased a product, we will stand by and support that product. We can provide project managers so we can maintain that equipment if there are any errors. Should any issues arise with our equipment, we have a service team to support that.”

It is this trifecta of flexible, high-quality products, a willingness to collaborate and innovate, combined with extensive global experience that has garnered Rittal the reputation it has today. Trust and strong relationships are not commodities that can be minimized in mission-critical environments, and you certainly can’t expect to deliver a five-star experience without, well, experience.

“With the versatility and flexibility we provide today, this is just the next step in the evolution of our solutions. It's having these conversations so we understand the challenges our customers are facing, so we can help them protect their investment, whilst also meeting the demands that they are seeing today and for tomorrow.”

Seeking top-tier colocation solutions? Discover how Rittal's flexible and standardized IT infrastructure can help you meet the evolving demands of today and tomorrow. Visit: IT Infrastructure - Colocation Data Center Enclosures | Rittal