If anything that the current Covid-19 pandemic has taught us, the worldwide demand for new data centers will continue to accelerate. As there is an increasing need to design, build, deploy, and operate more complex mission-critical infrastructure, the data center industry is challenged by the lack of talents who are skilled, experienced and properly trained.
Coupled with other issues such as the inability to forecast demand and location, the result is a decline in data center initial quality with increased costs in building works and overall management uncertainty.
Fortunately, the data center industry has been following the lead of the telecom, datacom, and oil and gas industries and building upon their learnings in optimizing building designs for modular and prefabricated construction techniques.
Applying those techniques, along with many industry innovations, these are being deployed at affordable costs and quick delivery without any compromises on quality.
What is a Prefabricated Data Center?
It is a data center that is pre-engineered and has its systems (hardware and software) preassembled, integrated, and tested in a factory environment to shorten deployment timeframe and improve predictability of performance.
What are the benefits?
• Deployment of a data center solution is very fast! You can be up and running in weeks instead of months or years.
• Match business demand by enabling quick scaling of IT technologies, creating a back-up/disaster recovery site, locating your data center closer to end users, reducing real estate and OPEX.
• Integrated subsystems and modular designs can deliver efficiency gains in power and cooling, reducing operating costs.
• Modular designs can enable you to adjust your data center infrastructure as IT needs change.
How do you know it is suitable for you?
• A prefabricated module may be needed only for a specific resource (just power, just cooling, or just IT space) because of stranded capacity in an existing facility
• A greater IT capacity is needed than what an all-in-one module can support, and a single IT space is required (physical space constraint of modules)
• There is a requirement to separate personnel (IT, mechanical, electrical) from a maintenance and operations perspective to reduce human error risks
• An optimized footprint is needed, and function-specific modules can utilize larger capacity components and share clearances to provide a greater kW per square foot or square meter
