Telehouse - Connectivity, Reliability, Flexibility and Security

CONNECTIVITY, RELIABILITY, FLEXIBILITY AND SECURITY

CONNECTIVITY, RELIABILITY, FLEXIBILITY AND SECURITY

RELIABILITY, SECURITY

Head of Procurement and Financial Control at Telehouse France discusses how procurement strategy, digitalisation, environmental awareness and security form the core of their global service provision and growth.

FOUNDED IN 1989, TELEHOUSE FRANCE PROVIDES INDUSTRYLEADING DATA CENTRE

COLOCATION SERVICES AND MANAGED IT SOLUTIONS WITH GLOBAL CONNECTIVITY AND REACH.

t is owned by KDDI, a Japanese Fortune 500 company which is one of the top ten telecommunications companies in the world. Telehouse has more than 45 data centres in over 24 cities – including such key locations as London, Frankfurt, Paris and Marseilles.

Representing Telehouse France, a subsidiary of Telehouse Europe,

and here to tell us more about the company’s procurement, technological, environmental and security strategies is Hanane Pelissier, their Head of Procurement and Financial Control.

With more than 16 years of experience in the industry, Hanane is a procurement and financial management expert. She specialises in project organisation

and management, performance monitoring and improvement, transformation and change management. Recognised for her emotional intelligence, rigour, leadership and agility she is a business partner and a growth enabler at Telehouse who steers the organisation's trajectory with engaging leadership while developing a growth strategy that combines economic performance, resilience and sustainable development.

When asked to describe the company’s services, Hanane says, “Telehouse France is a leading provider of data centre services in France. We operate five carrier-neutral data centres, offering a wide range of services designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes looking for secure, reliable, resilient and scalable data centre solutions.”

Telehouse offers a different range of colocation options including

Shared Facilities Management (SFM), from half-rack to full modules, which has been developed for clients with space requirements that are likely to change over time. They also offer Dedicated Facilities Management (DFM). Dedicated suites provide the confidentiality and security required for certain critical activities. All of their facilities are equipped with state-of-the-art security systems including biometric access control, CCTV surveillance and 24/7 security staff on site.

“WE

PRIDE

OURSELVES ON THE QUALITY OF OUR SERVICES”

“In addition to colocation services, Telehouse France also offers a range of managed IT solutions including connectivity, security and network services,” Hanane continues.

“We pride ourselves on the quality of our services. Telehouse is committed to upholding the highest environmental, security and corporate social responsibility standards. This is reflected through our various ISO-obtained certifications, including ISO 9001 for Quality Management System, ISO 27001, HDS and PCI DSS for Information Security and Business Continuity. Telehouse has a proven record of meeting the highest international data centre standards, so we have the full scope requested for data centres in order to operate correctly.”

When asked what sets the company apart, Hanane

identifies four key factors, “Telehouse is well regarded in the industry for their connectivity, reliability, security and flexibility. We are trusted partners for companies in the business world looking to scale their IT operations, connect their business and stay competitive in an increasingly digital marketplace.”

But where does Hanane operate within these endeavours?

“I'm a member of the Executive Committee and responsible for leading finance controlling and procurement functions on our different sites. I make sure we are developing and driving the implementation of finance and procurement strategies to sustain transformation and growth at Telehouse,” she says.

5 PILLARS OF PROCUREMENT STRATEGY

Telehouse sees procurement strategy as a roadmap to be implemented and ultimately make the business more competitive in its markets. For them, it defines how an organisation runs its procurement function, provides a governance framework and gives direction for the way the organisation intends to conduct its procurement function and activities.

Hanane elaborates, “Our procurement strategy reflects our

“OUR PROCUREMENT STRATEGY REFLECTS OUR ORGANISATION’S VISION AND GOALS TO SUPPORT TELEHOUSE’S PRIMARY OBJECTIVES AND BUSINESS STRATEGY”

organisation’s vision and goals to support Telehouse’s primary objectives and business strategy. Our procurement strategy is based on five key points: cost optimisation, supplier management, risk management, compliance and strategic sourcing. We aim to build strategic relationships with competitive suppliers so we can acquire necessary goods and services of the best quality, within a specific cost range and ensure they are delivered on time. As a global provider of data centres, Telehouse’s procurement strategy is designed to support the company’s growth and success. It focuses on ensuring that Telehouse can secure the goods

and services needed to operate efficiently, effectively, securely and affordably.”

Technology and digitalisation are crucial to this strategy.

“Digitalisation plays a transformative role in procurement and in finance, it is reinventing these two functions,” says Hanane.

“By leveraging digital technology, we streamline our procurement and financial operations to reduce costs and improve efficiency and accuracy. By digitalising procurement, we can address current challenges and stay future proof. We have been on a journey towards digitalisation of our procureto-pay (P2P) process for several years now. This has helped us to automate some mundane tasks, accelerate purchase approval workflow, streamline certain transactions, reduce costs and processing times, mitigate the risk of error in banking transactions, free up data and improve expenses control alongside budget monitoring. Taken together, these advantages contribute to improving the technological, economic and also logistical performance of our department.

“So today and in alignment with our current business model, we are investing in new digitalisation projects as we consider it to be crucial for the success of our business.”

DRIVING GROWTH BY IMPROVING EFFICIENCY

Underlying their digitalisation and procurement strategies, Telehouse is always looking to improve efficiency and thereby drive growth. For instance in cost optimisation, Hanane explains, “Telehouse aims to optimise costs across all areas of our procurement operations while paying particular attention to the quality. We identify opportunities in all purchasing categories by considering total cost of ownership (TCO) when analysing offers, negotiating multi-year agreements, leveraging automation and digital technology and optimising our process. We also implement short-term initiatives allowing quick wins, such as reviewing and monitoring current contracts terms, challenging technical specifications, avoiding maverick spending and challenging uncompetitive suppliers.”

“TELEHOUSE AIMS TO OPTIMISE COSTS ACROSS ALL AREAS OF OUR PROCUREMENT OPERATIONS WHILE PAYING PARTICULAR ATTENTION TO THE QUALITY”

Telehouse considers risk management a critical and continuous process. Appropriate risk assessments are undertaken, reviewed and managed throughout the procurement journey, so the company built a robust risk management framework to mitigate the risks associated with procurement and finance. This includes identifying potential risks, developing contingency plans and implementing measures to monitor and mitigate these different threats.

In terms of supplier management, Telehouse maintains a strong and close relationship with key partners in order to ensure that they meet company standards for quality, reliability and security.

extension of the wider Telehouse team. We need the best

“We care deeply about delivering the best overall value and service to our customers and society. Partnerships with our suppliers are an integral part of this goal, because we consider our suppliers as a seamless

partners by our side to overcome obstacles, embrace opportunities and build an exciting future. As such, we developed performance matrixes to monitor our partner compliance while also developing a robust system of analysis of our partners’ performance. We are very careful when selecting and shortlisting providers before going to do business with them because our vision for procurement at Telehouse is to become the primary customer for the best suppliers,” summarises Hanane.

One such supplier that Telehouse works with is Ribbon Communications.

“Ribbon Communications is one of our key partners for the Telehouse Metroconnect service,” says Hanane. “Telehouse selected them as a partner after a full market assessment. The high-performance solutions they offer convinced us to go ahead with them for our strategic connectivity projects. They are a global provider of real-time communications software and IP optical networking solutions.

“In fact, before choosing them we looked for a partner offering a high level of security and operational excellence because we must have these conditions to connect our Parisian sites, which

“RIBBON COMMUNICATIONS IS ONE OF OUR KEY PARTNERS FOR THE TELEHOUSE METROCONNECT SERVICE”

Making Data Centre Walls Transparent

Handling More Interconnection Traffic with Lower TCO

Imagine that the world relied on one giant data centre with all the zettabytes of application and storage data whizzing about between servers over an area of only several tens of square kilometres. Located at the Nor th Pole for cooling, powered by several nuclear plants and linked to the world’s telecommunications networks using optical fibres strung along the lines of longitude, this might be considered the height of efficiency

Of course this vision is impractical for reasons of latency, data redundancy and competition between businesses. The result is that the world today suppor ts about 8,000 data centres. The challenge then becomes to network these data centres together, to make them transparent to each other, for caching data locally to reduce latency, interworking between applications and mirroring data for business continuity This requires many thousands of high speed optical links spanning distances from tens to thousands of kilometres. And every year inter-data centre traffic demands keep growing.

Ribbon’s solution to this challenge is a revolutionary optical transpor t platform, Apollo OT9408.

Optimised for data centre residency with front to back airflow and a 600 depth, OT9408 suppor ts more traffic over fewer wavelengths while d lowering the cost per bit . It does this by delivering:

• Best Wavelength Reach – To transpor t multiples of 100GbE, 400Gb future 800GbE client traffic, OT9408 exploits next gene transceiver technology to deliver industry-leading 1.2T haul, 800G wavelengths that cover the entire metro-regional space, tripling the reach of current competitor solutions, and 400G for ult

• Industry-leading Density – OT9408 suppor ts industry-highest 19.2 in a 2RU form factor.

• Best Power Efficiency – With consumption as low as 0.11W per gigabit, OT9408 consumes 50% less power per bit than competitive solutions. This green characteristic is especially impor tant to reduce data centre energy costs.

• Optimal Spectrum Use – OT9408’s high performance 1.2T solution uses 150GHz spectral bandwidth that aligns with the 75GHz bandwidth needs of its cost-power optimised 400G solution. This enables multiple solutions to co-exist on a single fibre without any wasted spectrum.

• Advanced Pluggability – OT9408 uses pluggable technologies for all client and line interfaces, enabling pay-as-you-grow economics and facilitating field maintenance.

• Superior Openness – OT9408 is designed for easy operation, including field replaceable modules and streaming telemetry. Moreover, its wavelengths can be deployed over existing line systems as alien wavelengths, with control exercised in a disaggregated fashion using standard OpenConfig interfaces. Its 400G wavelengths also suppor t OpenROADM interoperability.

Contact Ribbon now to see how Apollo OT9408 can enhance your data centre interconnect solution. rbbn.com

are a crucial connectivity hub in France providing direct access to more than 750 global operators.

“Ribbon offered us advanced technology capability with a turnkey custom installation of their solution. So, thanks to this strategic partnership, we successfully offer our corporate customers the ability to optimise their costs by hosting their IT infrastructure in our Telehouse 3 campus and benefit from highspeed, reliable and low latency connectivity with our central connectivity hub in Paris TH2

Voltaire site which is one of the five most connected data centres in the world.

“In fact, thanks to Ribbon and our strategic partnership, we have been able to break down data centre walls to help more customers benefit from our connectivity.”

However, IT infrastructure needs the right facility to host it, and here Telehouse works closely with Cap Ingelec – one of the leading French data centre design and construction companies.

Cap Ingelec is one of the French leaders in engineering, thanks to its know-how in the design and construction of technical buildings, particul arly in the fields of datacentres, cleanrooms and critical facilities. We offer our engineering expertise through project management and turnkey projects.

“We rely on their know-how to support our engineers and help them progress on our various expansion projects and plans. This includes, among others, our new project in Telehouse 3 campus, while also respecting our expectations and requirements in terms of reducing our carbon footprint,” says Hanane.

“Cap Ingelec are committed to our objective of implementing

But even the fastest, most reliable technological solutions hosted in the latest state-of-the-art data centres still need one fundamental resource to function: energy. For Telehouse, it is vital that this energy be as sustainable as possible.

Since 2015, Engie has been the energy provider for Telehouse. Commenting on this eight-year partnership, Hanane lauds

innovative solutions and designs, optimising our CapEx costs and reducing our time-to-market. These advantages represent a real competitive differentiator in our business. With Cap Ingelec we introduced a new contractual model guaranteed maximum price contract (GMP), an openbook agreement. Thanks to this new contract model, we work with full transparency and confidence with Cap Ingelec – allowing us to move forward quickly, to unite our forces and skills to face market challenges, all while controlling our costs and deadlines.”

the connection between the companies, “We have a longterm relationship with Engie. They provide all our data centres with green electricity. Our partnership is based on proximity, listening, responsiveness, expertise and trust. Our objective in working with them is to consume less and better.

“So even with the recent situation in the energy market with high costs and volatility which strained international European governments and companies, our energy procurement strategy and

“CAP INGELEC ARE COMMITTED TO OUR OBJECTIVE OF IMPLEMENTING INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS AND DESIGNS, OPTIMISING OUR CAPEX COSTS AND REDUCING OUR TIME-TO-MARKET”

our strong relationship with Engie allowed us to control our energy costs,” says Hanane.

Telehouse is highly aware of the environmental impact of data centres and the huge volume of energy consumption they need to operate.

“According to an international energy agency, data centres use nearly one per cent of the global electricity demand and contribute to 0.3 per cent of all global CO2 emissions,” explains Hanane. “So in this context, Telehouse is always on the lookout for any opportunity to reduce our energy consumption and environmental impact. We have present and future projects brimming with innovative solutions allowing a considerable reduction in our consumption. We are committed to a serious environmental plan, including the development of a photovoltaic park, engagement in PPA contracts

and using excess waste heat from data centres recycled for use in nearby houses, businesses, or communities.”

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

So what are the principal ambitions at Telehouse for 2023 and beyond?

Besides maintaining growth and success, Hanane draws attention to their exciting ground-breaking expansion project in the Paris area which will become their main campus.

“Our new TH3 campus is a hyper-scale data centre facility with an environmentally responsible design that reconciles environmental impacts and energy performance, integrating new technology while also offering a high level of scalability. We are targeting a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.3 and a

“WE HAVE A LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP WITH ENGIE. OUR PARTNERSHIP IS BASED ON PROXIMITY, LISTENING, RESPONSIVENESS, EXPERTISE AND TRUST. OUR OBJECTIVE IN WORKING WITH THEM IS TO CONSUME LESS AND BETTER”

YOUR ENERGY PARTNER: DO BETTER WITH LESS

ENGIE has been Telehouse’s energy supplier-advisor since 2015, providing green electricity for all its data centres.

ENGIE teams offer businesses and local authorities:

• Close relationships, expertise and customer focus via a team of two dedicated contacts

• Energy budget management expertise

• Eco-friendly solutions

As standard-setters in low-carbon energy, ENGIE works tirelessly with customers to accelerate their transition to a more sustainable world.

Your Energy supplier-advisor entreprises-collectivites.engie.fr

WUE (Water Usage

Effectiveness)

close to 0,” Hanane describes.

“These goals are ambitious, but we are excited to be focusing on this new data centre. Located 15.5 miles southwest of Paris, the TH3 campus is strategically located. Easily accessible from the capital, the TH3 campus allows companies and organisations to keep control of their data and retain sole access. At the right distance from the many data centres concentrated northeast of Paris, away from possible risks, TH3 is the ideal campus to provide redundancy for the IT infrastructures hosted there, as part of a strategy for diversifying sites.”

The TH3 campus is not only ambitious in terms of its sustainability but also its sheer scale and security goals. Hanane elaborates, “The project is made up of five new buildings for a total IT space of 12,000 square metres. This is an exceptional size facility in the French market, making it a kind of hyper-scale data centre where our customers can expand without any limits in terms of physical space or energy needs. The new data centre has a total power of 18 megawatts.

“Moreover, the site is secured to military defence levels. The data centre is being installed on a former military site building offering exceptional security and technical specification to guarantee continuity of service for our customers. Of course, there are standard CCTV and security measures in place but we also provide constant surveillance from dedicated staff 24/7. We have a clear focus on security.”

With these exciting developments in the near future, Telehouse prides

TH3

itself on how it looks after its staff during times of change and growth.

“Two topics, I think, are crucial for our business success are developing team skills and retaining talent,” says Hanane. “It's especially important for me as a manager in my procurement and financial

functions. We believe categorically that developing team skills and retaining talented employees are critical components for our success. By investing in these areas, we can improve productivity, foster innovation, boost morale and reduce staff turnover and, of course, enhance customer services,

“THE TH3 CAMPUS IS NOT ONLY AMBITIOUS IN TERMS OF ITS SUSTAINABILITY BUT ALSO ITS SHEER SCALE AND SECURITY GOALS”

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION FROM THE WAN TO THE DATA CENTRE

NOS for the Cloud) ta es this disagg egation and ability one step fur ther. Now proven at scale in the world’s largest cloud networks, SONiC is built around a containerized architecture and uses containerized applications, linking them quickly across the network, using a common language and standards-based APIs to deploy network applications on any hardware.

At Ribbon we see the datacentre as the logical extension of telecoms solutions for enterprises. We have extended our por tfolio of disaggregated IP routers to provide the NPT 2032, an IP CLOS Data Center switch. The NPT 2032 uses cer tified ODM whitebox hardware, industry leading merchant silicon and Ribbon’s commercial pure SONiC distribution. And with 20 years exper tise in IP routing deployments across the world, Ribbon provides the 24/7/365 suppor t our customers need.

Integration and Suppor t

Whitebox Hardware and Merchant Silicon

because ultimately Telehouse is a highly customer-centric company.”

We look forward to seeing where Telehouse goes and hearing all

about its new Parisian facility when it opens.

For more information, visit www.telehouse.fr

ADDED VALUE

For Hanane, at a personal level, her children and family are a true source of energy and purpose. She insists, “There is no success without your loved ones around you.”

Hanane also emphasises her gratitude to her mentors. “For me, I value the input from my mentors who inspire me enormously and who allow me to always see bigger, farther and more positively. They make even the most challenging circumstances seem a little bit easier.”

But for Hanane it is not only the mentors we know that are important, but the input of strangers is also incredibly insightful too.

“Today, thanks to interconnectivity we have access to a wealth of information. We can follow intellectuals online, absorb new information, discover new challenges and innovations –which is a great privilege. But the one thing I’ll note is that we must

also be careful because too much information can kill communication.”

“I'm excited to be joining several different conferences this year where I look forward to participating, adding some value when possible, exchanging knowledge with different people and seeking opportunities to grow as a professional.”

Hanane has written an article due for publication soon about the criteria of choice for providers and their procurement process which will be dedicated to the new technology sector.

To connect with Hanane and see her article when it is released, you can find her on LinkedIn.