HP reinvents self as data center designer

After a freeze in the construction of new data centers in the past couple of years, the market is starting to thaw a bit. And Hewlett-Packard wants to provide more than servers, storage, and networking. It also want to design and manage the construction of the candy coating that wraps around all that gear. That was the idea …

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Data Centers are Booming! (Virtualisation or Cloud ring a bell?)

"After a drought in the construction of new data centers in the past couple of years, the market is starting to thaw a bit."

Understatement of the Century! From what I see companies specialising in fitting datacenters ranging from storage companies offering Comms (e.g HP) to comms companies offfering storage (e.g. Cisco) to 3rd party data center installation specialists have all announced that 2010 saw a significant uptick in data centre / cloud revenues for them (most in excess of 30% growth last year in this area of business!). (I will cede that it may have been off a very low base!)

The amount of data being stored globally is growing exponentially and combined with the use cases for virtualisation (driven by EMC/VMWare, Ctirix, MS et al) and cloud type use-cases are also driving lots of data centre expansion and renewal projects with companies outsourcing their own data centres to hosted ones as a means of cost reduction.

This business is booming!

[Anonymous Coward]

Simples

Comodatising the centre is an obvious step.

Base it on a standard container so it will fit on the back of a lorry, thus making it easy to deliver.

Build it so that one unit could burn without affecting any others in the stack (covers worst case scenario).

Build other supporting module with the same footprint.... Power, heat extraction (though each module has its own environment, you still need to get rid of the heat), web interface unit, backup storage unit, base unit for easy build on roughly prepared ground etc.

Make sure your modules have a standardised interface so they plug together.

You have a system that you can upgrade, expand, downsize if necessary, move location simply, and build on cheap sites, at the corner of your existing site etc.

Its the weekend so time for a beer