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There are three main options or tiers of modular data centers depending on how quickly you’re looking to deploy.

• Tier 1: Pods. Choose a vendor, choose your gear, and have the neat little package delivered to your door and ready to go.
• Tier 2: Prefabs. Similar to pods, except these can be built partially by the vendor before delivery, then finished on site.
• Tier 3: Hybrids. For a company who has a clearer idea of what their needs will be in the future, you can choose a mixture of modular and traditional aspects of a data center.

Each of these options involves a lease of some sort, allowing the company quicker access to the equipment they need without sacrificing quality. But are customers sacrificing flexibility for speed? Because pods don’t require the approval a new brick and mortar data center would, the decision can be a quick one. Just like with any decision to add hardware or expand your computing capabilities, there is a list of things you can’t forget about no matter what form your data center takes:

1. Cord management: This should be a no-brainer whether you have a huge data center or a pop-up with one server in the parking lot. With the limited space provided inside modular data centers, you can’t afford to let something as simple – and as hindering if done wrong – as cord organization go haywire.
2. Data allocation: Because space is limited, be sure that you won’t need to access the hardware in your pod every day. If you store your pod down the street or in the parking lot, your employees will have to adjust to being productive in a completely new space.
3. Careful choosing a vendor: One of the major drawbacks is vendor lock-in, a concern anytime a company must rely on one company to provide a service. Be sure that you’re covered by a company with sufficient customer service or be prepared to downsize at the drop of a cable.
4. Consider the options: Is expansion the best option for your company’s needs? Before dropping the bucks and clearing out a space, be sure that virtualization or cloud computing aren’t better fits for the data you’re looking to store in that box. Understanding how short-term solutions like modular data centers fit into your long-term plans can save you time and money.

What are your thoughts on modular data centers? Are they just another fad that should be avoided? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section or via email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

It’s been a common sight at trade shows for a few years now: The data center in a box, letting the proud owner haul 2000 cores or petabytes of data around the country on a moment’s notice in a utilitarian, affordable package. Sun’s sells them, Microsoft’s got ‘em and Intel’s been pushing a data center-in-a-box standard to chop prices and, presumably, stuff more of its chips in them.

Data centers-in-a-box are a nice, tidy package, as Jeremiah Owyang explained when the products first cropped up a few years back:

This first one is the new Sun Data Center in a box, called Project Blackbox seen on 237 in East Palo Alto. This data center is what marketers call a “Solution Sell” when you bundle up services, hardware, software and support and repackage and apply to a business pain. These data centers contain web services, routers, networking equipment, storage, and sometimes remote power. You just plug it in for remote locations, high growth areas, or even for disaster computing needs (if your primary data center goes down, drop one of these in asap).

The products are relatively inexpensive, dependable, predictable and come in the same packaging each time. In other words, a lot like fast food. And like fast food, they’re making their way into a lot of diets, though not as the primary component (after all, Apple and Facebook did just invest billions in traditional data centers).

Over at Data Center Journal, Jeffrey Clark has a good breakdown of the phenomenon, noting how different the promotion behind DCIBs is from why customers are actually buying them.

• The vision was for a vast lot of plug-and-play data centers, maybe an ominous barbed wire fence and a Doberman or two for security. Your company suddenly getting traffic like it’s the next Twitter? Don’t wait for a year or two to get your fail whale under control, but get a fully configurable data center grid up and running in a few weeks. Move them around, even migrate them seasonally or when your headquarters shift.
• The reality is that the cost savings of having a standard, factory-like assembly for these mammoth boxen has helped drive down costs, so that even if you already HAVE that data center facility that takes years to plan, you might still save money by having an all-in-one unit where you can add servers and environmental control more incrementally without wasted cooling or unnecessary resources.

Maybe it’s better that way. Besides being an eyesore when out in the open, Matt Stansberry points out this rosy marketing image of parking lots full of standalone data centers might just be making more tornado bait. The last outcome you want is confidential business data being flung to the far ends of Peoria.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.