i/o Datacenters take advantage of modularization

By utilizing an old New York Times plant and their own modular datacenter products, i/o Data Centers hopes to be able to deliver physical datacenter facilities on demand to customers who want a place in their new 831,000 square feet of datacenter space. A capability made possible by the use of modular data center hardware; basically the customer’s datacenter in a container that lives in i/o’s facility, drawing on their power supply and external network connectivity but self-contained in terms of cooling and computing equipment.

This approach really does a good job of addressing the issue of containerized datacenters; while the container can hold the datacenter for a single company, the container itself doesn’t need to reside on a pad next to that company’s office building. Naysayers on containerized datacenters have made the point that there is a limited market for containers themselves, but the modularization approach treats the container more like a large self-contained rack. And when you take that approach, it seems that there is a more sustainable large scale business model for containerized datacenters equipment.

i/o takes the approach that you can offer datacenters as a service and that’s a good fit with the current business attraction to cloud computing services.. With containerization thaey aleady offer the ability to deliver your datacenter anywhere you like, so offering the datacenter as a service certainly seems to be the next logical step.

And i/o must really think there is going to be growing demand for these services to allocate so much space. To give you some idea how much room 831,000 sq ft is, you could line up every NFL game played during a week of the regular (non-lockout) season, side by side, and still have room for the beer concession.