Designers of information technologies (IT) facilities today are challenged to keep up with several varieties of environments, some of which are mission critical and others that are not. Reliability and capacity requirements for power, space and cooling, and even equipment types, can vary greatly from one operation to another, so it is imperative that the unique character of each operation be considered carefully in the design process.
Owners are becoming more and more comfortable using a single facility to house several different operations. This has resulted in the need for multiple levels of redundancy and different types of cooling systems operating side by side in the same space. This trend is so strong now that we may soon characterize it as the era of the flexible data center.