US colocation provider Quality Technology Services announced Tuesday a new approach to power contracts with its customers. The products, announced at the DatacenterDynamics conference in Atlanta, allow customers to change the capacity they pay for during the term of the contract.

If the customer chooses the new PowerBank option, they contract for a large amount of power and space but have the opportunity to scale back to a smaller capacity if down the road they find that the contracted capacity is unnecessary. They can also scale up beyond the original capacity if necessary.

Play the video below to see QTS chief marketing officer Tesh Durvasula describe the new power contract options at DatacenterDynamics Atlanta 2011 earlier this week: 

Tesh Durvasula, chief marketing and business officer at QTS, said in a typical scenario, a wholesale customer commits to a set capacity under a long-term contract and their actual power usage ramps up to either a static or a fluctuating capacity well below the commitment.

"As your needs continue to change you have the ability to give back a portion of your commitment to us," he said about the PowerBank option. If the customer chooses to scale back sometime down the road, however, their rate for the power they do use will go up somewhat.

"They’ll take a small increase in rate if they decide to reduce their commitment," Durvasula said.

The minimum commitment for a PowerBank contract is 2MW. The contract can be changed in 500kW increments once every two years but the change cannot exceed 50% of the original commitment.

The second new option, called PowerFlex, provides an option to reserve a 500kW capacity block with no requirement to pay for the entire 500kW when it is not used.

To take advantage of this option, a customer must commit to a minimum of 625kW, a commitment they cannot change during the term of the contract. The lowest-capacity option would include a fully committed 500kW block and another one that is reserved but not necessarily used and paid for in its entirety, with a second-block minimum requirement of 125kW.

The second block is the Flex Block, which can be located either in the same data center as the standard 500kW block or in a different QTS facility.
 
Both of the new power options are available in the company’s Atlanta and Richmond, Virginia, data centers.