— Charles Iyo, Regional Sales Manager W/Africa, Eaton

By Emeka Aginam

Charles Iyo is the Regional Sales Manager, West Africa for Eaton’s Electrical sector. In a recent  training on Eaton’s best practices in data centre, energy and construction, Iyo  in this interview with Vanguard while outlining the company’s ongoing strategy to expand operations in Nigeria and increase the bottom line  explained why service providers should co-locate infrastructure in data centre to reduce cost. Noting that  Eaton is in the business of building the physical data centre from high power availability, zero downtime, he assured  that security of data  which is down side of  co-location is  being addressed.

Excerpt:

Strategy to expand data centre in Nigerian market

Our strategy is to expand data centre in Nigeria. As you know we have training and workshop for   for our consultants. This is part of the strategy to reach out to those people that receive the enquires for the data centres. We want to work closely with the consultants and we have realized that in Nigeria that some of these enquires go first to the consultants for design and you need to have a relationship with the consultants so that it comes to you to assist them. Today’s event is part of the strategy to driving data centre footprints in Nigeria.

Solutions

In terms of solution, I will tell you that Eaton does not just design and build data centre but we build end to end, almost all the devices that enable effective data centre. So we take care of down time, small footprints, we design our data centre in such that they are   resilience, there is redundancy, there is higher availability, 99.8 percent of availability. In terms of business overview for data centre, I believe  we  on the right part.

 Why data centre infrastructure  needs optimization

It does because need to avoid down time. The biggest element in data centre in  terms of downtime is human error. To avoid that, we need to build their data centre to be self-diagnosing. So the data centre is self-diagnosing. It reports to the IT manager’s or the administrator’s  mobile  devices. It does automated health check.

So you can decide and say that everyone will do a health on the power distribution component because we now have switch meter where you can remotely switch off and on particular socket in the data centre without being physically been there.  You can do it  remotely.   You can say a particular system  is hanging; I need to reboot it remotely.

Charles Iyo

Between enterprise and co-location data centre

Co-location data centre  is  a data house where people buy space. It exists as a business where people go in, buy space. They are either taking their sever there or go in and buy space in existing server. Because it is provided as a business, they provide the power and the enabling environment. They take care of everything to be 100 percent available.  For the investor, co-location  is a way of reducing CAPEX. It is cheaper f to run and more highly available.

So it does not have to build his own data centre. The enterprise data centre owned by a business needs to be built by that business for their business. When they do that, it ties down resources. They need to have an IT department and an administrator whose role is running of the data centre. When they do this, they tie up resources.  If it is a bank for instance, they need to concentrate on their banking activities and not on data centre optimization or worry about down time.

But if it is co-located , they will not have to worry about tie down capital . Service providers are advised to go into co-location which is the trend now so that they will not have to tie down their capital expenditure. The advantage is that it is cheaper for the investor. It is more highly available. For the enterprise data centre owner, he  has his resource tied into running a data centre when that is not his core  business  running the data centre. He needs to free up time  and resources to run his business.

Down side of co-location

The down side of co-location is data  security which is being addressed. The fear of the investor that wants to move his data to a third party to manage.   He fears that there is possibility of hacking into the data. So there is the fear of data being hacked by a third party without his knowledge but today, even though your data is co-located, it is only warehoused for you. You still run all the security on it.   Nobody can access it even though it sits remotely somewhere with somebody. So, that is the only fear of most people  but that can easily be overcome with strong security system around your data. Agreed, there are some regulations  by service providers hacking into data  of co-located data but people still have the fear  despite regulations.

 Building the physical data centre

Eaton is in the business of building the physical data centre from high power availability, zero down time. Zero down time because   we   are able to build in redundancy, we are able to build in    power distribution units that are intelligent, power distribution unit that can note that there is   imminent failure on a component and report to the administrator. So with that, there is high availability of the system itself. What happens to the data is dependent on the owners.

Because of our breath of portfolio, we are able to build a data centre end to end. Because we are strong electrical company, we do the electrical side of the data centre, the switch gears, the 11kv transformer from that point  when the power gets into the property and  when the systems are powered. Eaton can provide every component in that  sphere, including  the power distribution unit,  the UPS,  basic switch, the Racks. We provide cooling. We provide all the passive components in the data centre.

 Challenges

I do not see any  challenge in offering our services  because we have all the solutions that can give you  a very stable data centre. We have everything you require to own a data centre.

After sales support

We have after sales supports. We have  trained Engineers within Eaton.  We also work through our channel parters. We also empower our channel partners. Eaton is a channel focused business. Business in Nigeria happens on relationship. We train and  empower our channels partners that own the relationship so that it will work the way it will work. We have training in Finland, in  US, in  South Africa, among others. Our relationship  with banks has been good.

Operation in Nigeria

Eaton has been  in Nigeria not less than  fifty years operating through  channels partners. but Eaton as an entity has been in Nigeria for like three years.  We are here to strengthen the business  of our channel partners.

We are not afraid of competitions.  What I tell my customers is that Eaton is one of the top ethical companies in the world. We are very safety conscious.