After my editorial on portable data centers, I had a number of people knock down the idea, saying it doesn’t make sense for them. I concede that not everyone can take advantage of data centers at a container level, but I’d also note that I think not everyone should be running a data center. Most companies don’t have the expertise to do it well, any savings they get from less hosting fees is probably lost in the overhead of inefficient running of the centers.

Instead I think that many companies that have a container’s worth of servers, which could be some few hundred servers, might do better with a container and allowing companies to host containers of servers.

And if other companies can provide the entire structure, like SUN, then perhaps it can be cost effective. However, they can’t just provide their regular servers in a container.

Google posted some tours of it’s data centers on YouTube, and they were very interesting. The first one on this page shows some of the ways containers are implemented, but if you notice during the server replacement, these aren’t regular server that’s racked. Other vendors need to implement similar measures.

The other problem with containers, is a how you get there from here. Most companies grow over time, which means they start with a rack or 2, or 3, and by the time they have enough to fill a container, they might not want to make that investment. I’m not sure of what you would do here to solve this, but something should be done.

I really think that economies of scale will win out here, but it’s will take time, and the need for data centers to become more of a commodity, with better security and separation for customers without a big price premium.