Goldman Sachs has signed a strategic technology partnership with IO as its preferred, global modular data center provider.
The investment banking giant, one of the world’s largest consumers of data center capacity, will use dedicated IO modular data centers at the supplier’s ‘Data Center as a Service’ sites in Singapore, the UK and the US.

This “Data Centre 2.0” strategy “marks a shift from large real estate-based infrastructures to flexible and sustainable modular installations” the company said.

Goldman Sachs will also deploy IO.Anywhere modular technology in its internal data centers and will use IO.OS, IO’s data center operating system, in each deployment.

“We are pleased to partner with IO and believe their Data Centre 2.0 strategy provides sustainable enhancements to our data center operations,” said Don Duet, global co-chief operating officer of the Technology Division at Goldman Sachs. “Their innovative technology and services will allow Goldman Sachs to scale its data center operations more efficiently, and further advance the firm’s broader commitment to environmental stewardship and reduced carbon footprint.”

At an execution level Goldman Sachs expects capital and operational savings and to enhance energy conservation and power usage effectiveness (PUE) associated with its data center facilities through its service agreement with IO.

Speaking with DatacenterDynamics, IO CEO George Slessman said: “Goldman Sachs is an incredibly rigorous organisation and the scale of its IT operations is truly impressive. Goldman’s data center infrastructure team is as smart, competent and well trained as any in the world and has an enormous amount of experience. Goldman is not just one of the world’s biggest users of technology but is one of the world’s largest technology companies. It operates in the heavily regulated investment banking industry operating at a global scale.”

“One of the largest data center consumers in the world is not building data centers and not giving it to someone else e.g. colo. Goldman will make use of IO modular data centers as both on premises and secure hosted solutions. This is fashioned as a long term technology partnership and we are the supplier of choice going forward,” said Slessman.

“At the hosted level this is about giving dedicated infrastructure with full transparency. On the owned side it replaces the construction built data center with a flexible, managed and efficiently provisioned solution. This is a change in the way of thinking about how data centers are consumed. We are delivering modules for Goldman at a global scale as Goldman is expanding its hosted footprint initially in the US, London and Singapore."

Goldman has been through the assessment of our offerings and done rigorous proof of concept and testing and assured IO’s ability to maintain the IT stack, and provide the agility, optionality and efficiency to meet its objectives, he said.

“My view is that we are seeing the adoption of a software automated and productised data center and what has traditionally been the features of the IT stack, we are now seeing being adopted at the data center level,” Slessman said.

As part of the partnership Goldman has agreed to chair IO’s technology advisory board and committed to providing research and development of the IO offering.

Asked what type of workloads Goldman would be running on the IO modular systems Slessman said that IO was the supplier of choice and that it was unlikely that Goldman only planned to run test and development workloads in the future.

“Goldman Sachs’ adoption of Data Centre 2.0 principles and the resulting technology partnership with IO will accelerate the transformation of data center technology and its delivery. Technology and relentless innovation are now driving data center infrastructure decisions for the largest companies in the world.”

In relation to any impact on the company’s previously announced plans for an IPO Slessman said that while Goldman had unmatched credentials in this space no partnership decision on who would bring the company to market had yet been made.

As to the impact the Goldman partnership might have on the IPO timing Slessman said it would clearly have an impact but it was unclear whether it would bring it forward or push it further out.

“Right now we are focused on execution and there are many other considerations in relation to any IPO. We have doubled our staff in the last 12 months and we expect to double again in the next year.”

Slessman said: “This is about product. Standardisation of the data center is here. The walls are coming down.”