Pay As You Grow

A growing business places unrelenting demands on IT capacity.

To meet that demand, CIOs are increasing the number and density of servers and storage devices.

But how can you possibly design a large, capital-intensive data center to last 20 to 30 years when the technology it supports tends to change every two or three years?

You need a new approach to data center design.

The IBM family of modular data centers lets you pay as you grow.

Modular design is about deploying smaller increments of standardized components to give you flexibility to match business requirements to IT requirements and add data center capacity when you need it.

You can defer up-front capital expenditures by as much as 40 percent and defer operational expenses by as much as 50 percent.

Optimize Lifecycle Cost

The cost structure for data centers is changing.

Data center energy use is doubling every five years.

Per square foot, annual energy costs in data centers are at least 30 to 80 times more than those of a typical office building.¹

Floor space is generally only 10 percent of the total capital cost now and may no longer provide the most effective planning metric for data center design.

Up to 60 percent of the capital cost to build a new data center and 50 percent of its operational costs are now energy related.

When you approve the initial cost of a new data center you may also be approving up to five times that amount in operational costs over its 20- to 30-year expected lifecycle.

The family of modular data centers developed by IBM helps optimize the lifecycle costs around energy—the new IT operational metric.

Instead of the average data center infrastructure efficiency of 43 percent, energy-efficient modular data centers are designed to be nearly 66 percent efficient, which can help lower lifetime energy costs by up to 50 percent.

Flexibly Support Technology Change

Data centers need to support an increased pace of change driven by new IT equipment.

The typical data center is nearly a decade old, and it needs to last 20 to 30 years.

That makes it challenging to adapt to the changes in IT.

We’ve seen the server power density in those data centers grow by a factor of 20 over the last decade.

The family of modular data centers developed by IBM helps you adopt new technologies.

You can gain three times the power density growth in each module at one-third the cost of retrofitting an existing data center space.

You also can expand horizontally by adding modules as needed.

Modularity lets you adapt, deploy and use new generations of technology faster by designing in the flexibility before you need it so it’s ready when you need it.