Flexibility in design and a more modular approach could extend the life–and usefulness–of data centers.

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Cloud computing may be getting the headlines, but that hasn’t diminished interest in building new data centers.

The new data centers are being designed differently, though. They’re more modular, more flexible and much more accepting of new technology as it becomes available. The idea of building a data center every decade has met with the economic reality inside most companies. It’s simply too expensive.

So what exactly is different? Forbes sat down with Steve Sams, vice president of site and facilities services at IBM ( IBM – news – people ), to find out.

Forbes: What’s happening inside data centers these days?

Steve Sams: More than 75% of our customers are experiencing major challenges. Their IT growth continues to explode and they’re trying to run all of this in data centers that are up to 20 years old. The average age of a data center, according to a recent IDC study, is nine years old. Gartner suggests any data center more than seven years old is obsolete.

Why does it become obsolete so quickly?

Technology price/performance improvements are delivered by getting things into smaller and smaller footprints. Technology becomes more dense. The amount of power and cooling required if the rack is fully loaded has been climbing steadily. ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers) estimates that over the last decade technology density has increased 20 times. If you build a data center to support racks that are running at 1,000 watts per rack and you’re installing blade technology that’s running at 20,000 watts per rack, you have a mismatch. That’s occurring inside data centers all around the world.

Isn’t that one of the reasons companies are migrating to clouds?

We’re certainly seeing a lot of business for data servicing companies, where we’re building data centers for them, as well as for companies that are in-sourcing their cloud environment–or continuing to grow in a more virtualized way. In countries with more of a capital crunch the cloud is very popular. In countries like China and India where the customers are more focused on owning the assets themselves, they are interested in owning the data centers. There’s been a huge mismatch between data centers and technology. Technology historically got refreshed every three to five years while data centers were designed for 20 years. Continue Reading at Forbes


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