Modular designs are beginning to take hold across the data centre industry. With the benefits of rapid deployment and easily repeatable methodology, it is driving down the costs of adding additional capacity for data centre operators.
However, modular designs can be a double edged sword. There are many vendors on the market offering services to design and build your new data centre module. These vendors are often tied to their own business partners or use their own proprietary products in the design. This can tie you into a single supplier for your data centre which can reduce the competitiveness of their services.
In the current economic climate, it is also not uncommon for vendors to disappear from the marketplace making it difficult for you to source components and services.
Both of these factors can reduce your options when you want to add more capacity to your data centre but maintain compatibility with existing modules or technologies.
Supply chain management is important for data centre operators and a single weak link could spell disaster.
To help combat this, you should ensure that any new data centre design is vendor agnostic. The components and materials you use should be widely available and not just from a single supplier. The tools you use to run and manage your data centre should support open standards and protocols. Each layer of technology should be compatible with those around it and allow you to easily replace it at anytime.
The key to all of this is keeping it simple. Over complexity is often the cause of a failure and this is just as true for data centre design. Reducing complexity will keep your options open and allow you to adjust your data centre design at any time.
In an ever changing marketplace, new vendors and services are appearing all the time. Your data center design needs to stay flexible to accommodate these changes and ensure your business or customers are able to take full advantage of new technologies as they come along.