Data center physical infrastructure (DCPI) has become unmanageable to its users. Although characteristics of the industry have tended to support a culture of one-time engineering and custom installations, the time has come for the next step in its evolution toward becoming a streamlined support layer running in the background of IT operations, rather than a parallel operation competing for resources.

Standardization is a business strategy that has been used successfully for over 200 years to optimize products and processes in nearly every industry. The same principles can be put to work in data centers to provide the benefits of understandable, predictable, and efficient DCPI structure and function. Standardization can be analytically shown to improve, in some cases dramatically, every area of performance that drives DCPI business value – availability, agility, and total cost of ownership. Because of these wide-ranging effects and nearly universal influence on deployment and operation over data center life span, standardization – in particular, a modular standardization – is emerging as a key player in the optimization of the DCPI investment.

Continue reading to learn more about standardization and modularity in network-critical physical infrastructure.