My firm ESD is approaching 1GW of hyperscale design within 2018. In case you need to do the math, that’s 1,000 MW of data center construction, within one year alone. It’s a whole new game in the data center industry. Because of this mad rush to processing, colocation companies find themselves reinventing their business models to support hyperscale clients. The challenge is, do you overbuild to support a hyperscale market, and how do you balance your enterprise clients that require a smaller load than the hyperscale client? The answer is to adhere to a Colo4Hyperscale design model.
In the past, colocation clients had generally adopted a design model of 150 Watts per square foot (W/sq ft) of critical load, equaling a 2.5 MW block including the mechanical system support. The configuration was typically a catcher block design or a distributed redundant design. The components that supported this design were readily available for a speed to market build out, typically within a three to four month period. However, within the hyperscale industry, the design target often is 240+ W/sq ft). Additionally, the typical design capacity for a Tier 2 Network (in a distributed redundant configuration) creates a 32 MW capacity per network, which is far more than any colocation company wants to build out as inventory. The question becomes, how does a colocation company design their data centers to support hyperscale clients while economically also supporting their enterprise clients?