When we look at the growth of hyperscalers, cloud providers, and large-scale enterprises today, all too often the speed at which they need to respond to rising demand for their products and services with new data center builds is practically unattainable. For this reason, the data center provider that is able to work with these organizations as a strategic partner—designing and delivering adaptive infrastructure that aligns with their unique business requirements quickly, while also ensuring they have capacity where and when they need it—brings to the table distinct advantages.
The optimal approach is to design physical, electrical and mechanical infrastructure that is rapidly deployable, yet also deliverable in the right-sized increments to meet customers’ capacity needs and requirements as they change—today, tomorrow, and into the future.
For example, instead of building and commissioning a 50MW data center, and risk waiting for it to be fully utilized, it may be preferable to build the physical structure, and then incrementally deploy infrastructure at pace with demand.
This flexibility, which extends to electrical topology, allows the incremental deployment of infrastructure across a data center in one of two ways. First, a provider can simply augment the customer’s planned capacity. However, if the customer opts to grow in place, from a density perspective, that capacity can be added in the customer’s current physical footprint on demand without requiring additional square footage or a lift-and-shift of equipment into a different space.
Make no mistake, there are multiple risk factors when planning new data center deployments—chief among these are financial risk and ensuring on-time project delivery. But that’s where a standardized supply chain methodology that streamlines platform delivery, and provides a simple and repeatable model that enables scalability within the same footprint can mitigate these and other uncertainties. Having a rolling, large-scale pool of dedicated inventory can further accelerate scalability and commissioning at unprecedented time frames. This, however, requires a substantial capital commitment and long-term financial backing.