Modular Data Centers: Is Anyone Buying?
February 8, 2012
Is a data center built into a standard 20-foot shipping container on your shopping list, cloud service providers? That’s the question some are asking as these portable data centers, pioneered by Sun with its Project Blackbox (later dubbed Sun Modular Datacenter, or Sun MD), enter their sixth year of commercial availability.
Our friends at Data Center Knowledge (DCK) take stock of the market, noting that such modular designs are now common in huge cloud data centers and high-performance computing (HPC), with vendors saying they are set to become even more mainstream.
“Five years in, the questions abound: Are any customers really buying them? Who are they? How large is the potential market? What does the analyst community think about modular data centers?”
With its snapshot of the market, DCK looks at the companies using modular data centers and the size and potential of the market. While there are more than niche players — the list includes Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google — only 3% of companies plan to deploy modular data centers in the next 12 months, according to the numbers coming in.
But one of the challenges noted in the the report, in assessing the uptake of modular data centers, has been the lack of customers that will acknowledge their use. “One presumed explanation is that the earliest adopters were the U.S. military and other organizations that simply don’t talk about their data centers,” the report notes.
However, it seems a declining tide given the slow economy and resulting corporate frugality has lifted some boats: wholesale data centers, cloud computing providers — and, you guessed it, modular data centers. One standout bit of data on the market’s potential comes from HP, which notes a projection by IDC analyst Michelle Bailey that deployments will increase from 144 units this year to about 220 units in 2012.
But even so, modular data centers “aren’t going to put traditional brick-and-mortar data centers out of business anytime soon,” the report notes.
Analysts such as Jason Schafer, research manager at Tier1 Research, remain pretty bullish on the technology. “Today’s data center is obsolete when taking modularity and the fast maturation of this market into consideration,” he tells DCK. “If data center owners and operators are not at least exploring and considering modular components as a means for data center expansions and new builds, they are putting themselves at a significant disadvantage from a scalability, cost and possibly maintenance standpoint.”