Every few years, enterprise technology encounters a game changing trend that causes us to rethink the way we approach data center design. From the early days of mainframe computing, we have been gathering data for processing and analysis.
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.
Nothing seems to change as fast as technology, and that includes data center trends. As demand for more analytics, data processing, and storage increases, data center infrastructures have to adapt. As a result, we are seeing new developments, such as modular micro data centers (MMDC), hyperscale data centers, and new modular data center designs. Here are just a few of the data center trends we see coming in 2020.
A tight labor market is seriously affecting the construction industry, and the development and design of new data centers is no exception. When it comes down to it, there are simply not enough skilled workers to go around.
Every data center seems to suffer from the same problem: the need for more capacity. New technologies, such as big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT), are driving the demand for increased processing power, data storage, and physical space. Demand for additional capacity and faster data access is driving construction of new data centers, but they require land and take time to build. That’s why more organizations are looking to modular data centers as an optimal solution.