Data Center Trends
“ When you look at the large hyperscalers , the appetite right now to take down space is tremendous ,” says Aligned ’ s Global Head of Design & Delivery , Mike Coleman . “ The pace that they need to fill to try to keep up with the demand is unattainable . Hence , innovation has become secondary to iteration just so they can meet the demand , because every time you add some new technology , it slows the build process down . You have to vet it , there ’ s more testing , you ’ re not exactly sure how well it ’ s going to work , and the business simply cannot tolerance any delay or misses on delivering capacity .” Coleman sees less innovation right now , simply because of the sheer build volumes . “ However , it ’ s also allowing the overflow to drive growth in businesses like ours ,” he says . “ Providers are becoming much more strategic partners so that they can meet demand . Therefore , our capital , infrastructure and people provide a great recipe for them to reach out to us for support .”
Coleman also highlights the significance of what he calls “ the return to the metro ” of the early 2000s . “ In the past , data center construction was almost entirely in a metro area , close to the customer due to latency , with content stores closest to the user . Then , we saw the trend of everybody moving out of the metro to massive campuses in remote locations . But now , the tremendous growth in cloud is leaving the majority of the large cloud users in a hybrid environment . We ’ ve gone back to that latency requirement where large cloud deployments need to be close to the metro because very often , they ’ re providing services to an on-prem IT infrastructure , so you need close proximity to that . We ’ re starting to see 30-50MW deployments between these large hyperscalers in areas where they wouldn ’ t look to be building data centers because their sites are typically 200-500MW . The growth in this area is going to be immense .”
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