Modular Construction & Data Center Design Blog

An aging infrastructure is dictating construction industry trends. Congress has committed $2 trillion over the next 25 years to fix the nation’s infrastructure, and experts estimate that it will cost $1 trillion alone to fix the nation’s roadways and bridges. But that doesn’t take into account the aging office complexes and data systems. Architects, contractors, and engineers are looking for new ways to approach building projects, in an effort to handle growing demand with reduced budgets and tighter deadlines. That’s why prefabrication and similar strategies are growing in popularity, and becoming construction industry trends.

A data center is more than just a concrete box made to hold computer servers. It is a complex infrastructure designed to accommodate a variety of computing hardware and systems, each with different operational parameters. Data center design has to consider a number of issues such as green building practices, power redundancy, security and even being able to withstand hurricanes and tornadoes. Due to the parameters for data center operations being complex, so too are the standards that govern data center design and construction.

The success of any data center project depends upon efficiency. Reducing costs and shortening time to completion is essential when you are building a new data center. Once the data center is up and operational, you want it to maximize efficiency and ensure uptime, as any data center failure will cost you money. That’s why more data center owners are adopting vendor-managed inventory (VMI) as a strategy, to ensure they have access to the components they need, when they need them, without having to spend a fortune on stocking and storage.

Relocating any business is a big undertaking. Not only do you have to pack up the desks and move the file cabinets, but you also have to transfer all the technology that is critical to operations, from the photocopier and fax machine to the computer network. Establishing a new data center is likely to be the most expensive part of any move and the most critical to operations. That’s why you need to carefully review data center design and develop a strategy that is fast, cost-effective and extensible, because data demand is sure to increase.

When it comes to data center design, you want flexibility as well as economy. Any data center design will require upgrades and changes over time, so you want to be sure that all the components meet your center’s specification and can be swapped out as needed. That’s why when you are designing a data center, you want to be sure to work with vendors that use standardized technology and are truly vendor-agnostic.

Quality management is essential in any construction or fabrication process, including data center construction. No matter what the industry, customers expect quality goods and workmanship, which is why industry standards like ISO 9001 were developed. By using globally recognized standards, everyone in the production process, including the customer, knows what to expect from the quality assurance process. Industry standards also provide a common language to define what is meant by “quality.” They are also used as a way to measure processes that meet customer requirements and promote greater customer satisfaction, whether it relates to prefabricated data center construction, prefabricated electrical distribution centers, power equipment centers or another related system.

As computing technology continues to evolve, so too does data center design. The changes aren’t just faster servers and more efficient data storage, as the data center electrical infrastructure is changing as well. Existing data center electrical systems need to be upgraded to accommodate new hardware and maximize Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), while new data centers need to adopt the latest in electrical distribution centers and integrated switchboards to optimize the available space and provide power that can scale with data center expansion.

The need for more data and processing power is driving demand for hyperscale data centers. Today’s organizations are suffering from an overabundance of data. Cloud adoption is creating demand for hyperscale data centers to deliver added capacity, virtually on demand. With more than 43 billion devices worldwide expected to be connected by 2023, real-time data processing is also needed to support the Internet of Things (IoT). As more data needs to be processed and analyzed faster, the need for more hyperscale data centers will continue to grow.

When looking for the right modular data center supplier, you want to be sure you work with professionals who comply with international standards. Even if you are having a turnkey data center delivered, that data center still needs to be installed, inspected and maintained—and without standards, you have no way of knowing what’s going on under the hood, let alone how to fix it. Standards compliance plays an important role in all aspects of modular data center design and construction, especially quality control and quality assurance standards. 

Demand for new data center construction is on the rise, as corporations struggle to harness the growing flood of data needed for business analytics. While cloud computing services continue to prove valuable for data storage and remote processing, some computing tasks have to be handled closer to home. This is done to accommodate real-time data analytics, reduce latency delays, and address security concerns.