|
i/o Data Centers booth at DatacenterDynamics San Francisco 2010
Data center services provider i/o Data Centers is developing a containerized data center solution. What exact shape the product will take has not been made public, but the company’s Director of Data Center Engineering and Product Development Andreas Zoll shared at the DatacenterDynamics conference in San Francisco on Friday the company’s vision of what attributes the “next-generation” data center container should possess.
“It comes with power,” he said. “It comes with cooling.” The next-generation container is purpose-built, based on an open architecture. It is fully integrated, with redundancy tailored to the individual customer’s needs. It should also be “location-agnostic,” with international “plug-and-play” capabilities.
“You want to have something right next to your headquarters? You just put it there.”
Key benefits of containerized solutions, according to Zoll, are enablement of rapid scalability, need-based cost, geographic flexibility, design repeatability and better energy efficiency opportunities.
In its research of the container market, i/o analyzed the solution’s evolution that began in 2005 with containers inside Google data centers. The following year, Sun rolled out a commercial container offering, which was followed by Rackable (now SGI) in 2007. Other vendors caught on in 2008, with HP, IBM, Dell and Verari and finally, last year, companies like Bull, PDI, Microsoft, Emerson and Colt came up with next-generation containerized solutions.
In this evolution, i/o researchers noticed a trend of progress from specific solutions to increasingly standardized, modular approaches.
Related news: Google patents centrally connected container data centers
Related news: Latest container data center springs up in Germany
Related feature: SGI tries adiabatic cooling to make a data center container greener
Keywords: DatacenterDynamics conference, i/o Data Centers, data center container, containerized data center, Andreas Zoll | |
