Time is money. And, when it comes to data center builds, we’re talking a lot of money.

For colocation centers that are onboarding new tenants, every extra day it takes for a new renter to be fully moved in usually results in a highly painful loss of revenue.

The tenants feel the pain as well. These delays can negatively impact their expansion requirements, slow down new product releases, restrict their scalability, and create an unwelcome traffic jam of internal project delays.

When it comes to data centers, time isn’t just money, it’s solid gold!

For multi-tenant facilities, one of the greatest logjams is waiting on factory-built cages to be available and shipped.  

This is why so many colocation facility operators and enterprise data centers owners are choosing field customization when it comes to cage building.

With supply chains backed up as much as they are today, ordering and receiving cages with your specified design and security protocols can take several months.

This is because today’s sophisticated data center design is rarely a cookie cutter approach. Each company often has its own unique requirements in terms of cage security as well as material types, color and mesh gauge.

Many times, those cages are not sitting somewhere on a shelf just waiting for your order to arrive. This is especially true now with the supply chains being so brittle throughout the world.

Fortunately, field customization is a ready solution, and it’s one being embraced by more and more data center designers, especially those working in colocation environments where caging is essential if not absolutely required. 

By choosing a customized cage build, the turnaround times can cut off weeks, if not months from the full occupancy timeline.

One of the world’s key innovators in the process of field customization of cages is Instor’s own Paul Works, our Senior Director of MTDC. Years ago, he started on the path to building custom cages as a result of a customer’s urgent request.

“Everything in cage builds had 6, 8 and 12 week lead times, just as they do today,” Works said. “I had one client who said, ‘That’s too long’, so the only solution was to build our own. I thought, it couldn’t be that hard.”

“I went to Home Depot and bought a welder and started cutting panels and fabricating these cages and we began knocking our competitors out of the park with our turnaround times.”

Many years later, this initial ingenuity became refined and perfected into sought-after craftsmanship, making these field customizations more common than not for Instor.

“We mastered the approach to making the cuts and getting the angles precise and have the welding process down to an art form,” Works said.

“So, now the end product looks as if it came right off the factory floor. Except that it’s a fast turnaround and it’s fully customized to size and specification.”

With the need for speed being a priority in most of these data center builds, the time saved results in instant returns on investment.

“We can get it built in a matter of days as compared to the weeks and many months you might have to wait for your mass-produced cages to arrive,” Works said. “It’s not a difficult decision to choose custom for many of our customers.”

Speed to occupancy is a major driver for both colocation facilities and their tenants, yet there is a much longer-term benefit as well. With customization, you can fully maximize your space as the cages can be designed and built to fit like a glove.

For many organizations, that fit makes it an extremely valuable glove. It can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of optimization in typical data centers, and potentially millions when it comes to hyperscale applications.

If you are operating a colocation facility or if you’re planning on migrating or building a data center in the near future, we’d enjoy continuing this conversation with you.