Pre-engineered structures may offer efficient, economical options for data center deployment, according to a new whitepaper by The Green Grid, an industry consortium of stakeholders collaborating to improve data center and business computing efficiency.
The assembly line approach, in which the bulk of the data center is manufactured off-site, eliminates the expenses associated with custom engineering and architecture and allows rapid deployment. Any structural defects can be addressed long before the modular data center is deployed.
The advantages of pre-engineering include the ability to engineer the envelope, airflow, and cooling systems for maximum efficiency.
Historically, an organization building a new data center must wait until the new structure is built and then spend additional weeks installing and configuring hundreds or even thousands of servers, the authors note.
“In a containerized or modular data facility model, those same servers could be installed and configured at the factory, and the facility could then be deployed to the organization’s site and possibly be online in a matter of days,” say the paper’s editors, Christopher Kelley of Cisco Systems and Jud Cooley of Oracle. “For large-scale data centers that often cost in excess of $100 million, this could mean obtaining beneficial use months earlier and getting quicker business value from the depreciating facility.”