Published on December 9, 2008

Pre-engineered Data Centers – Past, Present & Future

We have all played with building blocks in our childhood and we know how interesting it was to have the power to build objects of several different shapes and sizes from the same basic building blocks. This may be a very crude example and a rough analogy but it goes to show how modularity helps in design.
Infact even nature utilizes this concept and all the matter we see around us is made from the same building blocks at the atomic level. Yet the situation has been quite different in the case of data centers where the practice has been to literally build a data center from scratch and in the earlier concepts the main emphasis was laid on maximum uptime, cost effectiveness, energy efficiency and so forth. Nowadays it is being realized that apart from these factors there are other factors which are equally important such as time frame of erection of a facility, its scalability with possible future expansion of the company and so forth.

Recent History and Current Trends
Before delving deeply into the concept of a pre-engineered data center, let us see if we properly understand the meaning of the same. A pre-engineered data center can be broadly defined as a data center which has been fabricated out of pre-built parts which are assembled together according to the specific requirements of the client. You can compare it to the assembling of a PC based on client specifications such as motherboard, RAM, HDD etc which are pre-engineered by different standard companies and are compatible with each other worldwide.

To read further, please visit the Data Center Journal website:
http://datacenterjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2303&Itemid=43