IBM Scalable Modular Data Centre

Growth. Cost. Obsolescence. High density. Sprawl. Hot spots. Growing organisations often find themselves in a quandary. They need to continually increase I T capacity to ensure business resiliency, support application growth and meet customer demands. At the same time, they must contain operating costs. Something’s got to give.

To meet capacity demands, many organisations are implementing high-density computing solutions, including blade servers. But high-density servers place greater demands on the data centre's energy consumption. As energy prices continue to rise, so does the cost of operating the data centre.

Other organisations are finding themselves simply running out of usable floor space. But building another traditional, raised-floor data centre is frequently out of the question. The up-front capital expenditures often make new data centres unaffordable. Designing and building a new facility can take months. And the space available for new data centres often constrains the implementation of traditional designs.

If an organisation can’t build a new data centre, it may be forced to install critical I T equipment in unconditioned, unsecured and unmonitored space. Mergers and acquisitions further disrupt the I T infrastructure, increasing the tendency of data centre operations to sprawl out over multiple buildings, companies or even countries.

• If you need to increase IT capacity to meet rising demands, would you like a quick-to-deploy data centre solution that can scale to keep pace with growth, requires no raised-floor space, and can help you reduce operating costs?
• Are you using, or planning to use, blade server technologies? If so, is your data centre specifically designed to accommodate the heat densities and power requirements of blade servers?
• Are energy costs consuming more and more of your data centre operating budget?
• Is your server environment too dispersed, inefficient, unreliable and complex to manage?

To address the many challenges facing the physical data centre, IBM is leading the development of a new concept in data centre design and deployment—scalable, modular data centres. This approach provides design and construction for a complete, turnkey, high-density and energy-efficient data centre environment in a short amount of time.