Originally posted to Data Center Frontier by Rich Miller.

If you stand at one end of the data hall inside at the ComPark data center, you are 710 feet from the far side of the massove raised floor – the distance of two football fields placed end to end. Peak 10 + ViaWest completed work on the Denver facility last week, creating a single room housing 148,000 square feet of data center space, enough to support 18 megawatts of IT capacity.

The huge data hall reflects the changing tides in data center design. For many years, the form factor for wholesale space was a data suite of about 10,000 square feet, supporting between 1 and 2 megawatts of IT capacity. That’s changed recently, as providers like CyrusOne, QTS Data Centers, RagingWire and Digital Realty have begun building much larger data halls, spanning between 35,000 and 85,000 square feet and supporting as much as 9 megawatts of critical power. Or, in the case of Peak 10 + ViaWest, even bigger.

The “plug and play” data center suite has been a major change agent in the technology industry, making it easy for companies to deploy IT equipment. Digital Realty pioneered the practice of creating raised-floor technical space and leasing it to clients, eliminating the need for companies to build and manage their own data centers.

To read the full article, please click here.