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Planning Your New Data Center: Think Modular

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Data Center Design .

It's common for facility executives to build a data center today that they know will take years to reach full capacity. Now Gartner Research is suggesting a slightly different approach: Build using modules.

Under a modular approach, you still need to estimate the size of the space you need. If you determine that you need a data center that is 15,000 square feet now, you still design the site to support it. The difference is that if you only need 5,000 square feet of servers, that's all you provision for now. The rest is left as empty floor space.

The advantage to this approach is dramatically lower capital costs. According to the firm's study, such an approach would drop capital costs 45 percent for a Tier 3 data center. Electrical costs would drop by 46 percent, the study predicts.