Data centers, like most of our economy, are going through a period of change and re-branding. 

In the stone age of data centers (circa 2005) we were able to put data centers on the street supporting somewhere around 100 watts per square foot.  This was considered really high density, supporting a vision for the next 10 years server farms and high capacity switching.

Of course that lasted all of about a year, and data center operators once again found themselves scrambling to figure out how to bring more power into the data center, and even more importantly how to bring enough cooling capacity into the data center to prevent servers and switches from burning up.

So, data centers began designing systems that would allow us to run data centers at more than 200 watts per square foot, designing cooling systems such as cold aisle containment and hot aisle containment, in an attempt to squeeze every bit of capacity out of existing data center spaces.

Now shift to the present.  A new evolution of data centers is taking place, using old technology.  Welcome the containerized data center.  If we concentrate on getting the maximum amount of servers stacked into a container, and concentrate on getting the maximum amount of cooling into the container, then we can extract heat directly into the air, maximizing the efficiency of space within a container.

Verari Systems (San Diego), Rackspace, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, HP, and IBM are all frantically working on container designs.  I have toured several of the designs, and have to say it is becoming a very interesting development.  Last week I had a chance to go through both HP and Rackspace's demo containers at the Gartner Data center Conference in Las Vegas.

My opinion is that a traditional data center design can probably get better efficiency and density than containers, however data centers are still struggling with the problem of extracting heat.  The container designs I have reviewed make this very easy.

I think designs such as in the following article are very interesting: Our Vision for Generation 4 Modular Data Centers - One way of Getting it just right  

Rather than spend $50 million building out a special usage facility, the new design is more like a trailer park, with the operator responsible for bringing in electrical power, carriers, and water for the cooling systems.  Much, much cheaper than building a complete infrastructure to support traditional data centers.  Probably better able to handle disasters such as earthquakes and fires as well.  Each container is its own environment, independent of other containers.  This supports the idea that one customer in a data center environment should NEVER be able to take another customer or tenant out of service due to a failure due to tripped breakers, fire, or technician error (i.e., bumping into somebody else's equipment).

This disruptive technology definitely needs more study and investigation.  While this may not make the data center industry obsolete, it certainly is seductive.

More to follow...