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Data Center Containers Offer Wall Street Scalability

A growing community of users and experts agree that building data centers in modular containers is the best approach.

What's the best way to cool a large data center that's currently only partially filled with servers but is expected to near capacity over time (a common problem as servers have gotten larger and denser)? A good approach, according to Glen Seimetz, director of portfolio strategy for data center and security services at Siemens IT, is to use containers.

"When you have incremental growth, you either have to buy extra space — which is expensive because now you have unused space — or have an architecture that's modular that allows you to build in little chunks as you grow," he says. "This is probably the best way to do it, power-wise and equipment-wise."

In addition, containers allow for consistent cooling. "If I build a container and have the cooling and energy systems prefabricated, it's going to work the same way every time I plug it in," Seimetz notes.

Such self-contained data centers in a box — offered by vendors such as Sun, HP, Rackable and CoolCube — are migrating from the original, freestanding trailers to a modular design of boxes that snap right into a building's architecture, like Lego blocks. Currently, such boxes typically are about 4,000 square feet; if the concept takes off, however, they'll likely come in a wider range of sizes.

"You'll drive large companies with critical applications crazy if you tell them you're going to put them in a trailer," Seimetz says. "It has to be able to work with the building architecture."

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