Standardization and Modularity

Data centers are built upon standardized commodity hardware and designed with modular architectures, aggregating multiple identical building blocks of facility infrastructure and equipment to support scalability, growth, and speedy hardware replacements. Modularity and standardization are key requirements for reducing investment and operational costs as they enable economies of scale for the procurement, acquisition, deployment, operation, and maintenance processes.

Common virtualization strategies and the constantly improving capacity and performance of physical devices both favor IT resource consolidation, since fewer physical components are needed to support complex configurations. Consolidated IT resources can serve different systems and be shared among different cloud consumers.

Figure 1 – The common components of a data center working together to provide virtualized IT resources supported by physical IT resources.