QTS' New HyperBlock Offering Addresses Need For Faster, Hyperscale-Ready Data Center Capability

As demand for quickly scalable data center capabilities skyrockets among large enterprises and public cloud providers, QTS Realty Trust said it hopes to capitalize on the "amazing transformation in the marketplace" with its flexible hyperscale offering, HyperBlock.

The Overland Park, Kan.-based co-location, cloud and managed services company, No. 64 on the 2017 CRN Solution Provider 500, touts HyperBlock, a roughly 2-megawatt-size deployment that's been in the works for some time, as being deliverable to the market in 120 days or less, thus giving hyperscale businesses the speed they require in this age of ever-growing demand for computing power.

"Certainly speed, scale, flexibility are things we hear every day," said Tag Greason, executive vice president of sales at QTS. "But visibility into their environment, being proactive in anticipating their growth needs – the things that you expect in a partnership have led us to be very engaged with these hyperscale companies. The driver of that is the Internet of Everything."

[Related: 2017 Solution Provider 500: The Top 100]

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

QTS, which reported $403.3 million in revenue and a 5.34 percent net profit margin last year, went public in late 2013 and just this year achieved Advanced Consulting Partner status with cloud giant Amazon Web Services. However, the company had been steadily expanding its data center reach over the past 10-plus years, beginning with the 2003 purchase of a small data center in Overland Park and now owning 13 data centers in eight U.S. metropolitan areas, including eight "mega centers" and eight leased or partner data centers.

These mega centers generally range from 300,000 to 1 million square feet of already-deployed infrastructure, QTS said, and are the engine powering the rapid deployment and geographically expansive co-location abilities presented by HyperBlock. But it's the onset of the public cloud that has especially fueled the demand spike for the 2017 CRN Solution Provider 500 newcomer.

"If you want to deploy a 2-megawatt block in 120 days or less, you have to have the mega center framework in place to do that," Greason said. "So we don't expect a lot of our competitors will raise their hand and be able to do it in eight cities or more around the country."

In addition to scale and speed benefits, HyperBlock gives hyperscale customers the ability to add the data in chunks as small as 2 megawatts and potentially as large as 50 megawatts. In this way, QTS could have a 2-megawatt deployment ready in 120 days, another 3-megawatt deployment ready by the beginning of 2018, and so on.

Ultimately, QTS sees HyperBlock as a carefully crafted response to the seemingly never-ending growth taking place in the market. Greason said QTS has received positive early response from hyperscale companies as well.

"Companies like Google, Uber, Facebook – they are really transforming how data centers are deployed and delivered. They're doing it with amazing scale. They're asking for incredible flexibility and speed to delivery. They're moving so quickly that the industry is being pressed to keep up and keep pace," Greason said. "As we watch the transformation, we see some great opportunities for a company like QTS to take advantage of the right positioning."