Cloud services drive pre-fabricated data center trend

Ongoing growth of the cloud computing space is driving service providers and Internet-centric application providers to think outside the traditional building box to keep up with demand by building pre-fabricated data centers.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, computing giants Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), Dell and eBay are adopting this method because they can be built not only faster but for a lot less money than building data centers from scratch. Dell plans to build 10 new data centers via the pre-fab module approach, while EBay said earlier their Phoenix data center would also leverage modules.

In some instances, those companies that have moved to the prefabricated approach have reported they have cut down the time to build a data center from about two years to about 16 months.

What's driving the need for pre-fab data centers and the equipment to carry the data for their clients is the rise of cloud computing and virtualization. By 2012, Gartner forecasts the cloud services market to grow to $102.1 billion in 2012, up from $68.3 billion in 2010.

But this trend is not just going to be driven by Internet application companies alone. Traditional service providers are also expanding their data center and cloud computing capabilities to offset ongoing erosion of voice service revenues in their wireline businesses through strategic acquisitions.

Some of the notable examples of this trend include Verizon (NYSE: VZ), which struck a deal to acquire data center provider Terremark, and Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN) purchasing Hosted Solutions.

For more:
- Wall Street Journal has this article

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