MeshBlox Micro Data Centres

Whether there is a need for temporary housing whilst a full migration to a new site is underway, or a current facility has outgrown it's capacity and you need more space quickly, MeshBlox has a containerised solution that will help.

For the last 15 years, companies have been migrating equipment out of branch office server rooms and into data centres. Commonly this is  due to insufficient power, cooling, rack space and lack of security.  But now there are regulatory, environmental and insurance pressures that induce companies to forgo the server-room. And because of these pressures there is often a transitional need for temporary storage whilst the planning and design for migrating equipment out of the server rooms is carried out.

Regulatory Pressures

Standards and regulations are now including DR and availability requirements for storage of data and data systems:

• PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard): Required for virtually every merchant and financial services firm. All the major banks and credit card companies impose PCI.
• ISO27001: This international standard for security management is gaining considerable recognition. Many larger organisations require their IT service providers to be ISO27001 compliant.
• BS25999: The emerging international standard for business continuity management.
• NFPA 1620: The National Fire Protection Association standard for pre-incident planning. It's a recommended practice that addresses the protection, construction, and operational features of specific occupancies to develop pre-incident plans that responders can use to manage fires and other emergencies by using available resources.
• HIPAA Security Rule: This U.S. law requires the protection of patient medical records and a disaster recovery plan for those records.

Environmental Pressures

Nearly every new commercial office block being built these days has tougher new environmental regulations to comply with and along with increasing energy costs are forcing architects and engineers to design buildings that are not meant to house much IT equipment. In fact, the trend is for facility managers to not even provide server room space within a building.   HVAC systems are being sized to only cater for “comfort air” requirements, meaning that they air conditioning only operates from 6am till 6pm on weekdays and only provides enough cooling and humidity to make it comfortable for people to work in, hardly a building to operate any significant amount of IT equipment in.

Additionally building owners are pressuring tenants to release server room space, power and cooling requirements for thier tenancy to provide more space for offices and new tenants.

Insurance Pressures

Business insurance audits for some time now have been identifying IT risks to the operation of a business. Most server rooms that operate within a commercial office building have poor infrastructure and generally are not redundant.  Along with the security risk of anyway being able to access the room, makes the humble server room a target by auditors.

MeshBlox Solution

When analysing the costs of improving a server room to comply with regulatory, environmental and insurance requirements vs moving equipment into a hosted data centre, it is often the hosted data centre that becomes the best option. And these have been the only two options available, until now.

With the MeshBlox containerised data centre solution, a cheaper, more manageable and better performing option is now available. For cheaper than the equivalent hosted rack option a DataBlox containerised data centre can be deployed close to end users and IT staff to make it more manageable and better performing than a remote, hosted solution.

MeshBlox provides support packages that include remote management and monitoring of the DataBlox container, providing similar services to what you would expect with a hosted offering. MeshBlox can monitor access to the container and/or rack, and in-conjunction with CCTV and fencing options makes the DataBlox a secure option.

For immediate temporary or permanent data centre options, talk to MeshBlox about what they can do for your business.