M O D U L A R D ATA C E N T R E S
Flexible
xxxxxxx Response is Key
New Data Centre Challenges
By Matthew Baynes, Enterprise Sales Director, Schneider Electric
Introduction
Matthew Bayne
discusses the
advantages of
pre-fabrication and
factory testing
In today’s world flexibility is a key
attribute for any business. The ability
to react quickly to changing market
conditions can mean the difference
between success and failure. In terms
of an organisation’s IT resources,
being able to match the amount of
equipment to the required information
processing load at any one time is
equally critical. Insufficient capacity
can cripple a company’s IT operations
while over specifying IT can be
ruinously expensive. Whether a data
centre is operated internally or by a
service provider on behalf of a variety
of clients, its management must make
tough decisions regarding capacity
planning and deployment. For large
capital-intensive projects, as data centre
builds usually are, the time necessary
to deploy new infrastructure introduces
a number of risks. Will the return on
investment justify the expense incurred?
Will interim changes in technology
between planning and fitting of a new
facility have any implications for the
amount and type of infrastructure
that’s deployed? As an example of
the latter, analysts have predicted
that rack densities are set to increase
dramatically with power dissipation of
between 20 and 40kW a rack becoming
commonplace. Although such forecasts
have so far failed to materialise, such
increases could have implications for the
amount and type of power and cooling
infrastructure that must be deployed.
Getting this wrong would have severe
implications. Modular
pre-fabricated data centre
infrastructures provide a solution to
these challenges, offering speed of
deployment, flexibility, scalability and
a greatly reduced risk of deploying a
redundant or obsolete infrastructure.
Modular Expansion
Naturally, there is no one size of
prefabricated data centre that meets all
situations. Small to Medium Enterprises
(SMEs) operating their own IT facilities
frequently need tactical solutions to
immediate problems, often having
to deploy small amounts of extra IT
capacity in a limited physical space.
Larger organisations or co-location
operators may need to expand rapidly
or have time-to-market issues that
cannot be met by a major construction
project. Some companies will have
other special requirements, such as
in the oil and gas industries that need
rugged facilities to operate in harsh
environments. Not all situations require
the same type of modular expansion.
Typically the functions of a data
centre can be broken down into three
categories: power plant, cooling plant
and the IT space. In many scenarios
Analysts have predicted that rack densities are set to increase dramatically with power dissipation of between 20 and 40kW a rack becoming commonplace.
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NETCOMMS europe Volume V Issue 4 2015
www.netcommseurope.com