DCnovation

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.

As a result, many enterprises have been forced to take a critical look at how efficiently their data center is operating. More often than not, a partial or complete redesign is required to meet this growing demand. The challenge is whether to go with stick build construction or prefabricated modules for new data centers. As organizations consider their computing needs, modular data centers continue to look more attractive than stick-built construction methods, for a variety of reasons.

When you commission a data center to be built, your biggest concerns are cost and time-to-completion. Data centers are an expensive and valuable asset for any organization, so the faster they can be up and running, the sooner the time to revenue. That’s why more organizations are opting for modular rather than stick-built construction—because modular data centers can be built much faster, for less cost.

In some ways, it’s hard to believe, but massive organizations like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are still scaling. These hyperscalers continue to bring more products and services online and deliver them to an increasing number of users scattered across the globe.

However, accommodating this massive traffic requires an ever-increasing amount of servers. Even in the age of omnipresent cloud computing, those servers need to live in a physical data center somewhere on the globe.

When it comes time to build a data center, large corporations have two choices. They can either build a custom data center from scratch, or they can opt to invest in modular data centers.

Modular data centers can deliver all of the same benefits as brick-and-mortar data centers, but there are still many misconceptions about them, including design and installation.

The savings aren’t solely from the fixed data center costs and in installation overhead. There are a variety of additional factors that make the total cost of ownership (TCO) of modular data centers substantially lower than traditional brick-and-mortar structures.

When weighing the pros and cons of using a modular approach to data centers, in lieu of a brick-and-mortar data center, modular data centers prove to have virtually all the capabilities of conventional data centers with more benefits. They also solve many of the construction challenges that go with erecting a stick-built data center.