With the increase in demand for high-performance computing power, Modular Data Centers (MDCs) play an important role in a business’ success. Whether you are a new business with an AI-based application, a current enterprise building new internal and customer solutions, or an investor in IT infrastructure, here are the top 5 things to know about MDCs.

1. Control your HPC infrastructure

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric famously said: “Control your own destiny or someone else will”. In other words, a solution that relies on infrastructure owned and controlled by someone else can be risky.

Building your own MDC makes you the boss over how your HPC infrastructure is built, operated and maintained. This doesn’t mean you need to become an expert on building MDCs because you can partner with ECOBLOX who will work with you to design, build, operate and maintain your MDC giving you complete control.

2. Tailored Solutions Fit Better

Every MDC project is different and your needs, especially if related to AI training and inferencing can be very different from other HPC needs.

For example, an MDC can be tailored for AI training which requires intensive data processing and machine learning training. Or an MDC can be tailored for inference AI where ML models are deployed in real-world applications delivering instantaneous AI-driven insights.

These types of MDCs are typically designed as Tier 3 or Tier 4 data centers which provide up to 99.995% uptime (no more than 26.3 minutes of downtime in a year). They also have redundancies built in for every component, continuous cooling systems, fault tolerances and at least 4 days of independent power. Your HPC/AI needs and tolerance level may vary from that of other companies. You and your MDC provider can design the solution that best fits your particular needs without worrying about paying for what you don’t need or needing something that a shared resource cannot provide.

3. The M in MDC

While the M in MDCs means modular, it is worthwhile to explore the benefits that modularity brings, particularly when compared to traditional data centers.  First and foremost is faster planning, designing and testing. All these tasks can be done off-site. Actual construction time is significantly less too. While it can take nine to twelve months or more to build a traditional data center, an MDC can be done in two to three months.

A modular architecture also means the data center can be expanded more easily as the business needs grow, and older MDCs can be easily replaced and upgraded to the latest technology.

The cost of power makes up the largest percentage of a data center’s total cost of ownership. Improving workload efficiency with cooling systems is paramount and compared to traditional data centers, the cooling efficiency of an MDC can increase by more than 12% according to Delta GreenTech.

There are many other benefits of a modular approach; these discussed here are typically those that have the greatest economic and environmental/energy conservation impact.

4. EDGE Computing

For applications that rely on real-time data processing to generate results/make decisions, having data processing close to where the data is generated means low latency and a better user experience.

When the distance data must travel is minimized, the user doesn’t experience lag – a frustration for anyone who has experienced it during video streaming, online gaming, cryptocurrency or in any industrial automation and AI inferencing tasks such as autonomous vehicles and factory automation.

5. Portability

MDCs are mobile for fast transport to where they are needed. This is advantageous for temporary deployments and disaster recovery when a natural disaster has taken down critical infrastructure, for example, telecommunications. This portability is also essential in the military so that critical information is available wherever there are deployments. They can also be used as a backup for any critical data.

While there are many considerations for deciding on using an MDC for HPC/AI, these five are those that we typically hear from customers about their supercomputing data center needs.

More and more we also see customer interest in pairing an MDC with wind turbines for lower emissions and for storing excess power. Additionally, MDCs can be used for large-scale crypto mining operations.

Whatever your needs, ECOBLOX has the experience and turnkey solutions to help you plan, design and build your modular data center.