Prefabricated data center modules break the mold for design flexibility!

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Remember the old days when we built power and cooling infrastructure into a data center building? The IT load was all the same voltage and similar IT rack density and availability levels?

Wait a minute, that’s today, isn’t it? You wanted to double your UPS capacity or add another utility feed into a large bank of servers, but it’s likely not feasible unless you dramatically overbuilt your infrastructure and building, prewired redundant feeds, and buried them into your concrete (because you were blessed with a large budget and the ability to predict the future). What if there was some technology breakthrough and the new IT equipment you want to deploy is all some kind of high voltage DC (direct current) – could you retrofit your AC (alternating current) building to accommodate? Not likely.

Hold on, what if I tell you that they are possible now? What if your facility power, power distribution, cooling and IT physical infrastructure were not built into your building, but instead were building blocks that could be deployed and changed as needed throughout the lifecycle of you data center (which by the way could be an order of magnitude longer)? Does it sound like today’s data centers? You could deploy prefabricated IT building blocks and raise your density or availability levels by adding extra matching power and cooling building blocks, or, in the future, swap out an AC fed prefabricated IT building block to a DC fed prefabricated building with a DC power block to power it.

How about conceiving and easily deploying a custom data center that has wildly different attributes by sections?  You can have section 1 with normal AC voltage, low density IT without redundancy, section 2 with normal AC voltage, high density IT with power redundancy, section 3 with high AC voltage, high density IT with power and cooling redundancy, and section 4 with DC voltage high density IT with power and redundancy.

Something like this is very difficult to plan and deploy with traditional data centers, but   now it is the time to break the mold on traditional data center thinking.