MISSION CRITICAL
the reality has to hit at some point ,” warns Leppard . “ The beauty of simulation , replicated in many other industries , gives the ability to look at things in the round before they have to be set in stone . We build these DCs for capacity , efficiency or resilience – some will need 24 / 7 resilience while others may only need a portion of that . We can then start providing solutions tuned to the needs of a business rather than solutions for the performance of a facility .”
Fifteen years of the company ’ s expertise is built into its tools and solutions such as the 6Sigma range . “ When our users are simulating DCs , it ’ s important that what we ’ ve learned is built into the defaults to quickly give them the answers they need to understand where the efficiency losses or gains might be in their design ,” asserts Future Facilities Product Manager David King . “ In the past decade the rules of thumb people apply have improved , but it ’ s the small details which our tools can provide for construction models which can help owners and operators achieve better insight into how their DC is going to perform in the future .”
The innovation of Future ’ s offering lies in having a software package that delivers fundamentals in line with the industry for informed decisionmaking . “ We bring together usability and functionality with industry collaboration to provide the end user with a future-focused qualitative result ,” maintains Leppard . “ One of the biggest drivers is that no one can do this by themselves – this is a community effort . We ’ re confident we can bring together disparate silos such as IT and facilities with a tool that gets communication flowing to support better , quicker , long term decisions .”
With DCs getting bigger and calculations becoming increasingly complex , Future Facilities partners with cloud providers to give users access to multiple cores on a price per hour basis so they don ’ t need to buy expensive hardware in house . “ Virtual reality is something we ’ ve been embracing so we ’ re able to put our users inside the model using Oculus Rift ,” adds King . “ Looking to the future , we ’ re aiming to add some of our simulation results into augmented reality to help visualise the invisible aspects of cooling systems in DCs such as the air flow . We ’ re also investigating ways of automating
34 March 2018