The modular data center industry is exploding as more and more organizations are recognizing the benefits of building facilities that meet today’s capacity needs, while also providing ease of scalability to keep up with future growth and changing technologies.
Find out which key players in the data center industry are talking about modular data center construction in this industry blog roundup.
Equinix’s Jim Poole On New Interconnection Ecosystems, xScale, and More
The Data Center Podcast/Data Center Knowledge
In a recent interview with The Data Center Podcast, Jim Poole, Vice President of Business Development at Equinix, shared some insight into how the company is leveraging its position to expand into data center infrastructure for next-gen mobile applications, subsea-cable landing stations and hyperscale facilities.
According to Poole, 5G is going to be a game changer for the colocation industry as cellular networks transform from primarily voice-focused to incorporate more business use cases, increasing latency issues:
“Telecom infrastructure in the existing mobile networks all sits inside of their buildings. And they backhaul the traffic to places like us because latency wasn't ever a design consideration ...
“However, if I wanted to do something that had much lower latency, or I didn't want to transport traffic huge distances—hundreds of miles—then I would need to start breaking traffic out more locally. And I would need to do it at a place where the applications that want to have access to that traffic live.”
Subsea cabling is another area to watch in the near term. Colocation facilities are being installed in regions with no existing cabling, such as Bordeaux, France. Poole suggests these types of projects will drive an increase in modular data center usage because they can be deployed quickly to meet current capacity needs, with the option to expand later.
Aligned Lands Build-to-Suit Data Center Project in Salt Lake City
Data Center Frontier
Infrastructure technology company Aligned has purchased land in Salt Lake City and announced plans for a multi-megawatt, build-to-suit data center that will be completed in December 2021.
Aligned specializes in the build-to-suit data center model in which a customer pre-leases an entire facility, which is then customized to exactly meet that customer’s requirements. Build-to-suit mitigates some of the developer’s risk because the building is fully leased from the outset. This model also enables the developer and the customer to work together to meet sustainability, efficiency and conservation goals.
“In addition to speed and scale, the development also satisfies our customer’s requirement for water conservation, while still delivering industry-leading power usage effectiveness (PUE),” Andrew Schaap, CEO of Aligned, said. “Combined with our ultra-efficient Delta3 cooling technology, Utah’s cold desert climate enables us to deliver a waterless data center solution.”
This will be the fourth Aligned facility in the Salt Lake City area, which is becoming a popular region for new data center construction. The favorable climate is ideal for fresh air cooling more than 75 percent of the year, but that is just one of the factors attracting data center projects to Utah’s capital city.
Salt Lake City is also situated along long-haul fiber routes, offers affordable power and provides economic incentives, including sales tax abatements on data center equipment to tenants of colocation space.
These factors, coupled with affordable real estate and a highly educated local workforce, are likely to continue to elevate Salt Lake City’s status in the data center construction market.
It May Be Too Early to Prepare Your Data Center for Quantum Computing
Data Center Knowledge
Although practical usage of quantum computing may only be 5-10 years away, according to experts, it’s still too early to start incorporating rack space for quantum computers into your data center designs.
Quantum computing is maturing slowly, and it is still unclear which of the technologies in development will emerge as the leader.
"The early lead is with IBM and Google right now, and they are working using a technology that requires very low temperatures," Celia Merzbacher, executive director of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium, said. "There's a lot of infrastructure around the processor that is pretty big and cumbersome and is in some sense kind of hard to scale, but they're working on it."
Other companies, such as Honeywell and IonQ, are working on quantum computers that don’t require the extreme cooling capabilities that the IBM and Google computers need, which means they can potentially be placed in traditional data center facilities.
Quantum computing isn’t intended to replace today’s silicon-based computers. As it matures, this technology will be applied to use cases requiring high efficiency, such as air traffic control, electric grid management, financial portfolio optimization and modeling energy states for the chemical industry.
Until there is more clarity on which technology will become dominant and how quantum computing will be used in the mainstream, data center owners are advised to take a wait-and-see approach to planning for quantum computing.
DataBank Takes Hands-On Approach to Colocation Clients’ Hybrid Clouds
Data Center Knowledge
Colocation data center provider DataBank is invested in helping clients optimize for hybrid cloud in a way that meets their specific goals and pain points. This is why DataBank focuses on modular construction solutions to provide their colocation customers the flexibility and scalability they need to build effective hybrid cloud architectures.
“No two customers are the same when it comes to the problems they are trying to solve around hybrid,” DataBank CEO Raul Martynek said.
Colocation allows facility owners to target often overlooked or inadequately served secondary markets and provide tenants with hybrid-ready private cloud platforms. With a wide range of connectivity options for high-performance computing that otherwise would be inaccessible, and the ease of deployment and scalability of modular solutions, these facilities can deliver hybrid cloud infrastructure to even the most remote edge environments.
Flexible infrastructure, cloud services and reliable connectivity are essential elements for hybrid environments, no matter where they are located. Modular colocation data centers can provide all of these capabilities plus others, including managed services like updates and security patches, DDoS mitigation, and compliance management.
Want to learn more about the role of modular data center design in today’s data center industry? Download our Infographic "Traditional vs. Modular Data Center Design"!
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