For years, the data centre industry has over provisioned their capacity requirements because the need for high availability outweighed the need for efficiency.
The traditional approach to data centre design was to have multiple redundant components which provide resilient capacity to meet what you expect your future requirements will be. With a redundant design, you have much less to worry about as you can carry out concurrent maintenance on all components. A fault or failure should have no impact on your operational environment which should make your services much more reliable.
However, doing that means you’re spending a lot of capital up front on a building that is larger than it needs to be and tying up capital which you are not using.
The redundant design is very expensive, inflexible and does not scale well. Not all IT services will need such a high level of investment and in the current economic climate, a large scale redundant data centre just isn’t cost effective. If you don’t grow smart and manage your costs effectively, your services won’t be competitive.
This inefficiency in data centre design is manifesting itself as a huge cost to data centre owners and they are now looking to reduce their overheads by making their IT services more cost effective. Instead of providing redundant capacity in the infrastructure, operators and builders are now looking at modular designs instead.
A modular design means you only provision enough data centre capacity for your IT load which minimises the investment required during the build stage and allows you to scale your capacity as the demand increases. Other benefits of a modular design include repeatability and rapid deployment. As modular data centers use standard components and each are built the same way, it makes them simpler and cheaper to deploy.
A modular design allows you to provision capacity on demand and defer investment in infrastructure until it is needed. It helps keep your costs down and still be flexible enough to grow with your business.
The traditional approach to data centre design was to have multiple redundant components which provide resilient capacity to meet what you expect your future requirements will be. With a redundant design, you have much less to worry about as you can carry out concurrent maintenance on all components. A fault or failure should have no impact on your operational environment which should make your services much more reliable.
However, doing that means you’re spending a lot of capital up front on a building that is larger than it needs to be and tying up capital which you are not using.
The redundant design is very expensive, inflexible and does not scale well. Not all IT services will need such a high level of investment and in the current economic climate, a large scale redundant data centre just isn’t cost effective. If you don’t grow smart and manage your costs effectively, your services won’t be competitive.
This inefficiency in data centre design is manifesting itself as a huge cost to data centre owners and they are now looking to reduce their overheads by making their IT services more cost effective. Instead of providing redundant capacity in the infrastructure, operators and builders are now looking at modular designs instead.
A modular design means you only provision enough data centre capacity for your IT load which minimises the investment required during the build stage and allows you to scale your capacity as the demand increases. Other benefits of a modular design include repeatability and rapid deployment. As modular data centers use standard components and each are built the same way, it makes them simpler and cheaper to deploy.
A modular design allows you to provision capacity on demand and defer investment in infrastructure until it is needed. It helps keep your costs down and still be flexible enough to grow with your business.
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