Why adopting a modular design approach will benefit your data center
The focus on constructing a future proof, flexible data center has garnered huge recognition in recent years. Data center managers are aware that demands change and they understand that in order to succeed, they have to be able to adapt quickly to requirements in their business climate. A modular approach offers a long term sustainable solution and scalability in terms of business expansion. Here are the top 5 benefits of data center modularity:
-
Sustainability
Demand fluctuations are highly probable in the data center industry and a modular approach to design can assist this, enabling a phased growth over time. The modern data center user can greatly benefit from prefabricated data center modules, with numerous density levels and tier levels. System outages and downtime are to be avoided at all costs in data centers and modular designs can help prevent this, as components can simply be replaced without having to shut down the servers.
-
Scalability
Overcapacity can affect data center management at any moment. With modular designs, an entire area within the data center can be shut down without affecting the overall functioning of the facility.
Scalability
It is common for new data centers to be hastily constructed or existing ones to be extended to meet increasing demands, often without much consideration of the consequences of overcapacity. Modularity can alleviate these issues by allowing data centers to lower their initial investment and start off with only what is needed. The flexibility of modular components enables additional parts to be added to the system and allow for expansion as the demand increases.
-
Quick Construction
Construction and commissioning can cause significant delays for data centers. A modular approach to data centers results in commissioning becoming a much easier process.
With modular power skids, the construction process occurs offsite, permitting the data center to focus their efforts on a smooth integration onsite. This reduces installation time with FAT occurring before deployment.
-
Cost savings
Data center modularity reduces costs across all aspects of construction, testing, installation, maintenance and expansion. Its scalable features mean that investment can be phased, lowering initial costs and allowing expansion as the business sees fit. This results in costs remaining steady until such a time that data center operations increase. With modular power skids built and tested prior to deployment in the data center, onsite installation costs should also radically decrease. A smaller footprint with modular designs creates optimized space usage, which also reduces real estate costs for data centers.
-
Smaller footprint
As mentioned in the above point, modular data centers are typically much neater from their entirety down to their individual components. While some data centers will expand over time, some too will remain their original smaller size as they began. According to the Data Center Journal, 10% of survey respondents believe that by 2025, data centers will be one -tenth of the size they are today!
The benefits offered by data center modularity are too substantial to ignore. The ensured fulfilment of future requirements, speedy construction and deployment process and of course reduced overall costs signifies an approach that can improve current and future data center management.
