Are you thinking about building a commercial construction project in Washington state? If so, it is critical that you understand the ins and outs of the Evergreen State’s building regulations—along with what’s changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on supply chains worldwide. Although construction has been deemed an “essential” business in a number of jurisdictions, many suppliers have run out of materials and equipment, due to supply chain and logistics issues of their own.
It’s no secret that data centers are expensive to build. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the average data center project carries a price tag of $215.5 million. With land to acquire, IT equipment to procure and construction costs to absorb, costs can skyrocket before you know it—which is why it’s so important to put a lot of thought and planning into how you approach data center design and construction.
In an ideal world, your data center construction project would go off without a hitch. You’d beat timelines and come in under budget, and you’d never have to deal with mistakes, rework or disagreements.
In 2017, California’s gross domestic product grew to $2.7 trillion—eclipsing that of the U.K. and giving the Golden State claim to the world’s fifth-largest economy. In large part, this growth was due to the fact that the state is home to Silicon Valley and many of the world’s most powerful technology companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
These days, many organizations are opting to build modular data centers instead of taking the traditional stick-built construction approach. Not only does the modular approach help organizations save time and money, but it also enables them to ensure that employees remain productive during construction—instead of being constantly interrupted by the thud, thud, thud of a hammer.
It used to be that if your organization needed a data center, you had no choice but to break ground on-site and take the traditional stick-built approach for your construction project.
If you’ve ever been in an office when construction is happening, you know how distracting it can be. You’re trying to concentrate, but all you can hear is the thud, thud, thud of the hammer. Let’s hope you have headphones to block out the noise or you’re able to find a quieter place to work. Otherwise, it’s going to be essentially impossible to work at your full capacity.
“There is no greater concentration of computing professionals in a single place interested in efficiency, scale, openness and impact, than the OCP summit,” stated Rob Coyle, PCX’s director of sales and marketing.
Coyle, who oversees the customer’s journey at PCX Corporation, while working to remove friction from the client’s problem-solving process, recently presented and hosted an industry discussion at the 2020 Open Compute Project (OCP) virtual summit. Coyle, who has extensive experience selling and working within both the commercial construction and data center markets, has become a veteran attendee and presenter at OCP conferences perennially. However, Coyle experienced a very different summit in 2020, due to the unprecedented impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The construction industry isn’t recession-proof. At this year’s International Builders Show in January, the buzz was about low interest rates and a strong economy, promising a bright future for the construction market. That was before the global COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Now, new economic pressures are shaping construction industry trends, and suddenly, a downturn in the economy is looming and the future is much less certain.
