Modular or new trends in future data centers

It has been 5 years since the world's first mobile, virtualized data center-sun blackbox. Modular design is common in large cloud computing data centers and http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13840.html "> supercomputers, and vendors from modular data centers are ready to push this 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?

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

Which companies are introducing modular data centers

Today, 35 customers have used IO anywhere modules, including Photobucket,allianz,avnet,logicalis and Suntron. Meanwhile, cloud computing provider Red Cloud has 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.

HP's modular Data center product is called POD (Portable optimized Datacenter). 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 products of the Dell Data Center Solutions Group (DCS) are supporting the Bing map, the University of Colorado supercomputer and the tier 5 facility in Australia, and Dell will be used to populate its own cloud data center in Quincy, Washington.

Colt is providing its built-in modules for Verne Global in Iceland, which will hold servers to manage data pipelines for host hosting vendors while providing a major deployment for a system integrator in London Phoenix it.

AST Global's modular product has been deployed in the 21-Unit data center of a Danish financial customer, and AST global also provides the server for opera at the Thor data center in Iceland.

Ebay has adopted a new modular design in the U.S. Phoenix New data center and will use modular products in the second phase of the main datacenter near Salt Lake City.

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 have been the first company to use containers in large-scale deployments for its 2005 data center.

How large is the potential market for modular data centers?

One of the biggest challenges in assessing the current modular datacenter market 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, according to Michelle Bailey, IDC analyst. 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 specific 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. (Li/compiling)

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)