M9 for Colo

Built on Cato’s Power Orchestration Platform, M9 Software helps you maximize the revenue from your investment in your data center’s power infrastructure. A significant amount of capacity is stranded in most data centers (colo or edge) due to buffers, redundancy and under-utilization. M9 helps you oversubscribe the infrastructure and take advantage of this stranded power to onboard additional tenants without impacting your critical SLAs.

Designed a mission critical, highly reliable software solution that interfaces with your hardware infrastructure, it manages risk in a fully automated way - continuously monitoring your data center and taking actions to align your power consumption with power availability.

M9 Software unlocks stranded power and dynamically monitors to assess and mitigate any risk.

Problem

Today, 7 million data centers totaling 104,668 MW of capacity have been built worldwide. These facilities consume 594TWh annually, representing 2.4% of global energy consumption, and more are being built. A significant amount of power capacity is stranded in colocation data centers for three primary reasons - buffers to protect constraints such as breakers, redundancy to deal with potential failure of equipment, and under-utilization of contracted power capacity. Most colocation data centers only utilize ~60% of their power capacity. This leaves about 37,000 unused megaWatts and $24 billion in missed revenue opportunities out of the above industry statistics. Cato M9 Software provides a solution that allows cloud-like flexibility on prem.

M9 Overview

Stranded power is a significant opportunity for colocation providers to make additional revenue by selling it at prices suitable for lower-SLA tenants. The Cato M9 software product enables dynamic power capacity expansion combined with risk mitigation mechanisms to ensure that any changes to the data center, such as increased utilization or failure of redundant infrastructure, do not compromise contracted power availability SLAs with tenants. The result is cloud-like flexibility on-prem, through rightsizing contracts and burst capacity. Cato provides a risk-mitigation strategy through M9 software deployed at the data center, continuously monitoring power consumption, assessing the risk, and taking action. If the M9 software identifies a potential risk, it takes only the required number of lower SLA racks offline (shedding load) for a period of time to help bring the risk within acceptable limits. M9 software’s intelligent orchestration removes SLA compliance concerns. The actions taken by M9 software can range from notifying tenants to manually reduce their workloads to automatically taking workloads offline using smart circuit breakers and other devices that help control power draw.

Right-Sized Capacity & Power Bursting

Enable customers to match their contracted capacity to what they actually use and provide a safety buffer to demand as needed.

Financial Benefits

Depending on the customer power utilization in the data center, M9 can enable >200% of traditional power capacity to be sold. End user infrastructure strategy has changed over the last 5 years with the advent of cloud. Customers utilize rightsized contracts and bursting in the cloud to serve infrastructure on demand. M9 software enables cloud-like flexibility on-prem through right-sized contracts and burst capacity on demand. Offering colo tenants the ability to manage on-prem data center capacity in the same way they manage cloud capacity will be a major market differentiator. This strategy will attract cloud anchor tenants, hyperscaler tenants and traditional tenants, accelerating customer contracts and increasing revenue. The average customer tenant uses ~60% of their leased capacity. Making this capacity available for other tenants allows Colocation Providers the ability to add additional customers into the same space, and gives the colocation provider proximity and client development growth opportunities while diversifying risk. M9 software enables: right-sizing contracts and bursting capabilities to attract large, mature customers as anchor tenants; underutilized power from traditional tenants and capacity reclaimed from right-sized tenants to be leveraged for additional revenue; redundant capacity to be offered as additional capacity at a lower SLA. This combination leads to more capacity sold, increased site utilization and additional revenue compared to traditional colocation contracts.