IBM and Digital Realty Trust Discuss Modular and Scalable Data Centers

Data Center Dynamics Focus magazine has an article about IBM and Digital Realty Trust’s efforts on Modular and Scalable data centers.

Modular and Scalable the Way of the Future

19 Feb 2009

by Ambrose McNevin, Editor, DatacenterDynamics FOCUS

Two of the main proponents of the industrialisation of the data center are IBM and Digital Realty Trust, both of which believe that building and equiping data centers is a complicated business, made ever-more complicated when approached by traditional means

Applying industrial manufacturing principals to data center design and construction delivers huge benefi ts, according to IBM and Digital Realty Trust (DRT) And a key part of it is treating generators, UPSs and chillers as components in order to drive out costs at a capital and operational level.
Steve Sams, vice president of global site and facilities for global technology services at IBM, says the company has come to the conclusion that data center design needs to change radically. IBM believes that customers have shifted the way in which they buy technology. Where once they bought a big chunk of IT, used it up and bought another big chunk, technology purchasing has shifted to an on-demand model.
But, says Sams, data centers are still stuck in a paradigm from 30 years ago, where they are built in great big chunks, used up bit by bit and then another is built. “That approach is not capital or operationally cost-effi cient because you spent a ton of money but you are only using a fraction of the capacity you’ve just bought. So we are moving toward a scalable modular design in construction. Customers are buying what they need and then adding to it either from a power and cooling density or fl oor space perspective,” says Sams.

Microsoft has their posts on the concept as well.

http://loosebolts.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/our-vision-for-generation-4-modular-data-centers-one-way-of-getting-it-just-right/

http://blogs.technet.com/msdatacenters/archive/2008/12/08/microsoft-s-generation-4-data-center-vision-the-architects-perspective.aspx

Google should be coming soon.

Amazon I don’t know if we’ll here anything about their data centers for a while, but James Hamilton does continue to blog about the rest of the industry.