Dataplace provides more certainty in a 24/7 economy

Dataplace offers data centre housing solutions tailored to the needs of the customer with its modern, fully equipped TIER III data centres with built-in redundancy. These data centres can be found in various locations throughout the Netherlands: one is located near Rotterdam, a second one in the Utrecht area and a third one in Arnhem. A fourth data centre has just recently been added: Dataplace Brabant. From these locations, Dataplace houses both large and small IT environments for a variety of different customers. Minkels provides key contributions to Dataplace’s core processes, according to Marc van Erp (Marketing & Business Development Manager at Dataplace).

THINKING FROM THE END USER’S PERSPECTIVE

Designed with a clear philosophy in mind – whereby reliability, efficiency, durability and continuity play a key role – the Dataplace data centres have one mission to accomplish: to provide continuity and top quality data centre service 24/7. That is simple and clear language! But what is the one thing that distinguishes Dataplace from other data centres? Van Erp: “We think about everything we do from the end user’s perspective, from how we house the servers, to how we speak with the customers on the floor every day – every slightest detail has been carefully considered. But where did it all begin? Our own experiences from the past as a customer of various, large data centres. Those experiences – coupled with our improvement ideas from both a technical and a customer focus perspective – have formed this vision.”

MEETING EXPECTATIONS

The first Dataplace data centre – in the Rotterdam area – was established years ago as a direct result of this vision. “We also designed the data centres that were built later on in a similar manner. Short lines of communication, flexibility, speed and our willingness to do whatever it takes illustrate how we work. We also give each customer – ranging from multinationals to small, local specialised IT companies – a lot of freedom. For example, clients can use an online customer portal to view energy use or to order patches. Therefore, they can monitor everything to see if we are meeting our commitments.” And Dataplace meets and exceeds those customer expectations. “We keep things simple and clear when it comes to our relationships and recommendations, even when things seem complicated. And that is working well. Our customer satisfaction surveys confirm time and again how satisfied our customers are. They are not only satisfied with us, but also with Minkels and their racks. By the way, the same goes for us too. We are still very happy with the Minkels racks, aisle containment and the Legrand PDUs! Why? We ended up going with Minkels because the organisation fits well with ours; we also chose them because the product, the price and the terms were a great match. And it still is a great match! Minkels is flexible and they are happy to work and grow with us, even if we want something that is non-standard. Thanks to the Minkels engineers who know our data centre sites like the back of their hand, we always come up with an appropriate solution – for us and for the end users.”

DEVELOPMENTS

Van Erp sees flexibility as a strength in today’s market. “A lot is changing, so you have to be able to adapt quickly. Our sector is becoming more and more important for the strong entrepreneurial spirit that characterises the Netherlands. There is a reason why we are considered the third main port in the Netherlands in terms of industries. What do I think is going to happen? There is still a large group that maintains an in-house IT environment, and that group has yet to take the step towards moving IT operations to a data centre. That means further growth in the near future! We have also seen the early adopters, who have scaled back their inhouse environment because they took that step to move to the public cloud. Some of them will reverse that decision, either partially or completely, because the costs of “standard” cloud services end up being more than they expected, or because it is not always clear where the data is actually housed, or because there are performance issues. Other companies accomplish this by opting for hybrid solutions; some services run from the public cloud (such as Office 365) and all other services run from their inhouse IT equipment or in a data centre (private cloud). I am also seeing a clear trend of getting closer to the end user. Developments such as 5G and edge computing make regional data centres a necessity. The fact that we have multiple data centre sites is also very convenient now that companies are opting more and more for a back-up solution at a second, geographically separated data centre location. That provides more certainty in our 24/7 economy.”

Minkels Magazine 2018-1