Despite the economic volatility of recent years, demand for supporting digital business infrastructure continues to increase. While new data center construction slowed down initially during the global pandemic, it was followed by robust expansion with demand for capacity more than tripling year over year in the first half of 2022 in North America, according to the commercial real estate analyst CBRE. Much of this new global data center, or “greenfield,” construction comes from hyperscale data centers, although the market has seen a resurgence in enterprise demand too.
With these greenfield data center projects, network designers may be starting from scratch with only an empty room or just a concrete foundation. This means a significantly higher upfront investment is required compared to updating an existing network, but there's also the opportunity to create the right network architecture from the start — the only real constraints are size, power, and money. That differs from brownfield data center upgrades, which face added constraints from the network infrastructure in place, such as the existing cable type or cabling layout. Brownfield projects are often more time-constrained too, since updates to an operating data center may involve network disruption and downtime.