Manx Telecom has been unveiling its plans for its newest data centre, which is scheduled to open in March 2012.
Speaking to iNTERGAMINGi after the ICE show (where Manx Telecom announced the building of its new data centre), director of sales and marketing Marcus Warren said that one of the decisions behind the development is to increase the company’s presence in the egaming sector.
Manx Telecom has been active in the online sector for almost eight years and currently around 10 per cent of its revenues come from egaming, but according to Warren, the company is after a bigger slice of the pie. "We’ve seen over the last four or five years huge growth in hosting as a line of business. The current facility is a purpose built facility and it’s attracted a lot of the major names on the island, not just in gaming but finance and some of the other sectors. Particularly within the gaming segment we’ve seen a huge growth though so we’re at that point where we need to build for the next five, ten years in terms of capabilities," Warren told iNTERGAMINGi.
A £20m investment, Manx Telecom is currently in the planning phase of the new facility, which will be some four times bigger than the current facility. Alongside its headquarters, the company currently has a data centre in Douglas North - the main data centre - and another in central Douglas. The new facility will be located on Whitehoe Business Park, an area on the outskirts of Douglas that offered Manx Telecom the highest levels of resilience and redundancy, as well as the appropriate power.
Its second data centre is not yet completely full and there’s still capacity for new and existing customers, but it is ahead of schedule. "There’s a point where you think right we’re going to fill at some point and we need to be ready, we don’t want to ever be turning customers away and hence the reason we’re building this one parallel to the other," said Warren.
The new facility will be four times the size of the other data centre and will cater for some 750 racks. "It will deploy the very latest power management and surveillance and security systems and will give us real increased flexibility." Warren added: "It is all about power. Computers are getting smaller and smaller but they use more more and more power. They’re physically smaller but you’re actually drawing more power from that physical space so this will allow us to be much more clever and creative with the power management and that saves customers money, makes it more efficient."
Being efficient is a factor that is becoming increasingly important to customers and as Warren explains, their demands and needs are changing over time. "Power utilisation efficiency is a big issue for a lot of organisations and we’ll be able to offer the very lowest levels, which basically gives them a green capability as well, so helping them save money and the environment."
With the development of the new data centre, Manx Telecom intends to be more pro-active than it has previously been when it comes to new business. "As business comes to the island we’ve tended to benefit, but part of our go to market plan is to be much more pro-active so actually going out and identifying organisations that would benefit from coming to the Isle of Man. So hence, we’re strengthening the team - we’ve recruited our first off-island business guy - and we’ve identified 1,600 organisations within the egaming segment worldwide and are now focused on targeting those," said Warren.
