How big a potential market for modular data centers

    distance from the world's first mobile, virtualized data center-sun Blackbox has been over 5 years. Modular design is common in large cloud computing data centers and supercomputers, and vendors from modular data centers are ready to push the trend further. But people can't help but ask what is the status of the modular market? For five years, questions abound: are customers really buying? Who are they? How big is the potential market?

Placing servers in containers was initially just a niche trend in the data center area, limited to mobile-demand or temporary cloud infrastructure. Analysts and industry watchers have also debated fiercely whether the efficiency of modular data centers will be recognized by corporate users.

The company that launched the modular data center

Today, 35 customers have used the Ioanywhere module of IO company, including Photobucket,allianz,avnet,logicalis and Suntron. At the same time, cloud computing provider Redcloud signed a contract with IO to deploy 4.5 megawatts of modular power supplies to three different locations in Australia, which fully demonstrates its ability to deploy remotely. The product of the

HP's modular datacenter is called the pod (portableoptimizeddatacenter). Customers who have recently used pod to expand their IT business include UCLA, Skoda Dynamics, and Texas State El Paso, USA. The Pod series is designed for data center expansion, capacity increase, and disaster recovery, as well as temporary capacity during data center transformation, while providing maximum density without reducing availability. It also provides comprehensive management, automation, and integration capabilities.

The modular product of the Dell Data Center Solutions Group (DCS) is providing support for the Bing map, the University of Colorado supercomputer and the TIER5 facility in Australia, while Dell will be used to populate its own cloud data center in Quincy, Washington. The

Colt is providing its built-in modules for Verneglobal in Iceland, which will hold the server to manage data pipelines for host hosting vendors, while providing a major deployment for a system integrator phoenixit in London. The module products of the

Astglobal are already deployed in the 21-Unit data center of the Danish financial customer, and Astglobal also provides the server for opera in Iceland's Thor data center.

Ebay has adopted a new modular design in the U.S. Phoenix New data center, and will be near Salt Lake City's master dataThe second phase of the center uses modular products.

Cloud computing pioneer Amazon is using a modular design called Perdix, which deploys data centers for several sites in central Oregon State.

Microsoft has been most active in modularity, and Microsoft has made modularity part of the data centers in Chicago, Washington, Virginia State and Iowa.

Google may be the first company to use containers in a large-scale deployment for its 2005 data center.

How big is the potential market? One of the biggest challenges in evaluating the current modular data center market in

is the lack of customers who acknowledge the use of modular products. One hypothetical explanation is that the first use of modular products with the U.S. military, because it involves confidential information, so the military will not talk about their data centers.

HP predicts that modular deployments will grow by 76 units in 2012, based on the results of IDC analyst Michelle Bailey. At the same time, according to a reader survey conducted by Datacenterkonwledge in August 2011, 35% of users are using modular products or are preparing to focus on modular technology over the next 12-24 months.

The exact distribution is as follows

These data suggest that traditional data centers will not soon be reduced by new modular technologies. A two-thirds market will not consider modular data centers in the short term. But it also shows that the modular technology in the future has a broad space for growth. If you further demonstrate your own advantages, the popularization of modular data center technology will increase its attractiveness over time.