Best-in-class data center provisioning: Simplify, standardize, repeat

Demand for IT capacity continues to grow rapidly across the globe, which has driven the need for more industrialized approaches to data center construction and component assembly. Large operators and their partners have scrambled to apply new processes and disciplines, expand and re-organize supply chains, deploy prefabricated components, and, where possible, reduce cost overheads, variation and complexity.

These approaches have led to dramatically shortened provisioning times in recent years. Globally, the average time to provision a new large data center (20 megawatts or more), following best practices, is just nine to 10 months, according to research by the Uptime Institute Some are provisioned in as little as six months — an incredible achievement given the multiyear timelines of a decade or two ago.