Modular data center

Modular data centers are effective in solving the following tasks:

• Construction of large data centers with phased commissioning of IT facilities
• Creating a data center in areas where capital construction is difficult or impossible
• Increasing the capacity of an existing data center
• Rapid deployment of backup data center

Advantages of modular data centers:

• Reducing the amount of investment for the construction of a data center
• Energy savings
• Opportunities for dynamically increasing data center IT capacity
• Reducing the cost of upgrading the data center
• Reducing operating costs
• Approaching IT resources to their place of use
• Reduction of the data center construction time by 2-4 times (16-20 weeks)
• Reducing the time for construction / accommodation approval (modular data center is not a capital structure)
• Minimum requirements for the site for the deployment of a data center , both in open street versions and industrial hangar buildings (modules can be installed on concrete slabs or a concrete pad without a foundation)

Purpose of modular data centers:

• Medium and large businesses, state-owned companies, heavy industry, oil and gas companies - to create their own data centers .
• Colocation operators - to create colocation sites without significant one-time costs.
• The banking sector , the military industry, for data storage with enhanced security.
• Telecom operators - to expand the package of services.
• Research institutes - to host computing equipment

The design of modular data centers is assembled from several blocks, each of which has a different purpose:

• Energy module - designed to install energy systems. MSB, UPS, batteries.
• Server room - designed for installation of server equipment and heat removal systems.
• Entrance group - designed for staff access to the data center.

The boom of data centers occurs in the period 1995-2000. Companies needed a stable and high-speed Internet connection and uninterrupted equipment to deploy systems and establish their presence on the network. To place equipment capable of coping with these tasks was a matter of overwhelmingly for most small companies. Then began the construction of separate large premises that can provide the business with all the necessary set of solutions for the placement of computer systems and their operation. New technologies began to develop to address the scale and operational requirements of such large systems. .

Next in the era entered container data centers

Initially, mobile container data centers were used by the US military. The first commercial product, the Sun Project Blackbox, was introduced in 2006. In 2009, Google disclosed that it has been using container-type data centers since 2005. ^[one]

The emergence of modular data centers

The natural development of this direction was the emergence of a new class of data centers - modular data centers. The technology of their creation allows you to quickly build and scale a deployed object, and then build it up to the level of large data centers. According to experts, from the moment of signing the contract to the commissioning of the classic data center with an area of ​​250-300 square meters. m. takes from 7-8 months to 1 year. For a similar modular data center, due to the fact that all its elements are typical, the time for design, supply, installation and commissioning is reduced to 14-20 weeks.

Container and modular data centers ceased to be a niche type of business, emerged from the shadows and became a significant factor in the growth of the entire data center market relatively recently, at the turn of 2009-2010. The proliferation of modular data centers, an increase in the number of non-pilot, and facilities put into commercial operation is one of the significant trends in the global data center market in 2012. ^[2]

At the first stage, the concept of modular data centers was traditionally tied to sea containers (ISO size) and was considered as a functionally complete data center housed in a standard metal case. However, the development of the concept of modularity gradually went beyond the concept of “container data center”. However, the latter still have not lost their significance and remain in demand in various sectors of the economy.

As the concept evolved, most experts began to lean toward a different view on modular data centers. This approach assumes the possibility of preliminary installation and testing of engineering and IT subsystems of the data center in a container, which is a metal structure in the form of a rectangular parallelepiped of arbitrary, but standardized by the manufacturer sizes.

The emergence of container, and then modular data centers gave impetus to the formation of a new paradigm for the creation of data centers, the so-called Data Center 2.0 . According to its authors, it proclaims a departure from the traditional version of the construction of data centers, which was based on the business model of a data center as a building, leased premises. The new concept allows us to consider the data center as an IT element, a kind of software and hardware complex, through which customers are offered various services.

• Alexander Korsunsky. Mobile? Container? Modular! // Tsody.RF. - 2014. - p . 15-17 .
• Alexander Barskov. Modular DPC 2.0 // “Journal of Network Solutions / LAN”, No. 07, 2014.