German company 23media expands into Europe with dedicated hosting offering

“It’s pretty amazing that Minkels was the first data centre supplier in Europe to commercially launch the Cold Corridor solution,” says Tobias Rehn, CEO and owner of 23media. “Energy efficiency and the use of green energy are very important to us. It not only helps us address environmental issues for our customers but also provides us with the ability to establish a high quality proposition at relatively low cost. The Minkels Cold Corridors are of significant help in creating enterprise- grade stability and availability while also providing efficiency when it comes to the payments for our electricity bills.”

For customers in need of establishing cloud infrastructure, the company is able to deliver those solutions on a project basis as part of their managed IT services proposition. Although 23media’s main proposition is focused on dedicated servers, colocation and connectivity, some customers ask them to install and manage private cloud on top of dedicated infrastructure. In that case, they’re definitely able to meet customer demand.

CLOUD VS. DEDICATED

“The delivery of cloud services is part of our managed IT services proposition, one of our major propositions actually,” adds Mr. Rehn. “On the other hand, the main part of our client base is located in Germany and German people tend to have a great fear for bringing their data to the cloud. For efficiency purposes, a growing part of our customers are now utilising private cloud installed on hardware they own, but they almost never want to put their data into a public cloud environment.”

“Partly this is caused by very strong data privacy protection rules in Germany but even more it has to do with fear of losing sensitive data,” adds Mr. Rehn. “For that reason, German consumers are even afraid to use all kinds of web-based solutions from abroad. I also don’ t know any large German company deploying their infrastructure in a public cloud infrastructure.”

As 23media is a fast growing company with impressive growth figures, one may well ask where the secret of their success lies. “While connectivity is an important part of our proposition, we have been reinvesting a lot of our revenues back into our network,” adds Mr. Rehn. “This, and our ability to deliver enterprise-grade infrastructure with a flexible, pragmatic approach finally pays off. During the last couple of years we have seen a market change in Germany, with customers choosing high quality over low budget offerings. We have highly educated employees who are in close contact with customers and we are utilising premium brands only for routers, switches, racks, and so on. Due to our close partnerships with a selective amount of vendors, we’re still able to offer good value for money.”

BRAND IMAGE

Mr. Rehn says that the use of Minkels data centre solutions is adding to the enterprise- level brand image 23media pursues. “When we compare ourselves to competitors, still not so many companies in Germany are utilising aisle containment. The Dutch market is quite ahead of Germany for that matter. Customers are always impressed when we take them on- site in our data centres. The moment we show them the Minkels racks and aisle containment, they really love it. It actually works. Minkels racks and aisle containment have the high quality look-and-feel that meets enterprise requirements.”

As 23media delivers high-density infrastructure to its customers, the company has chosen to deploy 46U racks from Minkels. The modularity and thus flexibility of the rack components enabled 23media to have an easy install of extra wide and extra deep formatted racks while facilitating the implementation of high-density solutions.

“The 46U rack format makes engineering work much easier when taking care of server and networking cabling, and installation of power distribution units,” says Florian Beny, CTO of 23media. “The flexibility of the Minkels racks is pretty impressive. It also provides us with an easy solution for the cooling of our networking equipment. Minkels is one of the few in the market offering something like this, with networking equipment adjusted airflow optimisation from the side.”

“We have had some negative experiences with one of the other leading data centre vendors in the market,” adds Mr. Beny. “Minkels is different, they are really awesome from the first contact to the final delivery of racks, aisle containment and cable trays on top of the racks. Their people put a lot of time in to us as while whilst listening to our unique requirements, which ultimately resulted in a good package deal with good prices.”