Matthew Larbey, the director of product strategy for relatively new London colocation company Virtus, rattles off buzzwords ‘agile’, ‘connected’ and ‘efficient’ when we meet to discuss data center infrastructure management (DCIM). And while he admits they are words the industry uses without much thought these days, he says he believes Virtus has something up its sleeve that lends weight to the words – and it is all to do with transparency.

Technology teams at Virtus have been tinkering away with help from communications vendor CommScope and IT management solutions company TDB Fusion to integrate new capabilities to CommScope’s iTracs DCIM platform.

The result is a DCIM-based service that can now offer customers a view of their own environment, reaching beyond the rack to maintenance logs and even customer relationship management and sales platforms. It offers the ability for colo users to control their environment as if it is their own purpose-built data center.

This, teamed with flexible pricing models, according to Larbey and CTO Robbie McGhie, is helping to lay a new foundation for colo services that moves the industry away from long-term inflexible pricing contracts for space, opening the door for new ways to look at agility in the data center.

Virtus is now allowing customers in some cases to alter space requirements up or down by 30% in a matter of months. It is the closest it can get today to a pay-as-you go model, Larbey says, which he believes will one day be the standard for colocation.

“We came up with the idea during a meeting 12 months ago in which we positioned the market in five years’ time, McGhie says. “We put a wish list together of customer requirements. We had always wanted to share our information with customers but we never had a tool to do this, at the same time Virtus was growing so fast internally and we needed a management tool so we could deliver features internally.”

The software solution
Sharing information from DCIM tools with customers is something that goes against the grain of most colo providers. Space and power – and use of both – are what contracts are usually based on. While some colo providers will offer flexible contract terms, and others levels of transparency, Larbey (who previously worked at Equinix) says the industry rarely combines the two as part of a customer offering.

He says being such a young company, however, has allowed Virtus to design a business model that can build off of new levels of transparency. And as a result, Larbey expects the company see benefits that will go beyond goodwill.

Internally, Virtus can use the new tool to manage its own sales, customer relationship and billing systems and it believes it will also help lower power usage effectiveness (PUE), leading to more efficient operations by customers and in turn maximizing the use of space and power secured for its operations. “By letting customers have full visibility we expect to use 80 to 90% of contracted power as opposed to 50 to 60%,” McGhie says.

DCIM evolution
The platform also offers some insight into how the DCIM market could eventually progress.

The Virtus Intelligent Platform (VIP) is a web-based portal that allows programs such as SAGE accounting, Salesforce, Trend building management and Schneider Electric power monitoring to all be plugged into iTRACS. It provides users with a single pane of glass for facility insight, automation and management.

Customers can integrate data from their own IT assets and even control their facility from a remote office while 3D visualization has also been built in to help with deployments. The system Virtus has helped build can even track trouble ticketing and invoicing and monitor SLA performance.

The open format of the platform means more modules can be added as the industry evolves – “this will be quite likely as we move forward, both with DCIM and as the industry changes,” Larbey says.

The VIP service
Virtus currently operates out of a 33,000 sq ft data center opened in 2011 on the outskirts of London in Enfield. It plans to bring its second data center, with 65,000 sq ft of data center space, online in September.

CEO Neil Cresswell said Virtus was established to cater to new demands in the industry. “Our market has always been mid market, which size wise is mid to large solutions, not massive wholesale power shell deals and server-by-server rack to rack for hosting. That is way the market has moved in the last few years. We are seeing smaller more distributed workloads as a result of the difficulties customers have in predicting [what operations will be required] in three months, let alone five or ten years,” Cresswell said.

“In London we have seen three big growth areas, cloud – in all areas, lots of rich content and digital media that want to be in or around London but have quite big requirements. Interestingly, in last six months, corporate or enterprise IT has also risen again.”

As a result, Virtus has seen a number of cloud providers enter its facility. In March it signed four deals alone – ERA, Inatech, OryxAlign and L3C. Cloud and other service providers are now expected to white-label Virtus’ VIP solution, passing the benefits on to their own customers and using it as part of their own SLA.

And as the market heats up for cloud and other ecosystems, the DCIM service could be pushed out to other parts of the world.  Cresswell says Virtus is in talks with other “best-in-breed” providers in other locations which could eventually band together to create a global footprint.

But for now, DCIM is about opening up new conversations with customers in London. “If a customer wants to sit down with us and say they are not using as much as they thought they would, they can ask to move their contract down. On the other hand, they may use the predictive modelling and find they need additional capacity somewhere else. Previously colo was a bit of a black box, now you can put colo into a much wider context,” Larbey says.
 

This article first appeared in FOCUS Issue 36, available online here.