Standardized Data Center Design

In 1908, Henry Ford proved the benefits of standardization. You likely know the adage, “Any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.” Thanks in part to standardization, the Model T was the first widely affordable automobile. At Stream, we’ve standardized our data center deployments across our portfolio with a design that meets the design and performance specifications of the world’s largest data center users, and enables us to keep costs down and boost speed to market.

Having focused on a standardized MEP package, we are able to aggregate our equipment supply and then deploy where and when it’s needed to meet demand across our portfolio. Standardization minimizes the risk that would otherwise come from procuring equipment ahead of demand. By procuring generators, for example, a year earlier than we would have pre-COVID, we are able to keep deployment timetables about where they were before, and we can do that with confidence because we can use the equipment anywhere.

One of the potential downsides of standardization is rigidity, which doesn’t serve well when working with very large users with very specific data center infrastructure requirements. The specific way we deploy our standard equipment for one customer is often different from the way we do it for another customer. At Stream we balance the benefits of standardization with agility by infusing configurability into our design and construction standard so we can be responsive to customer needs and deliver capacity relatively quickly.

The core of our design is standardized, with configurability built in so we can be responsive to customers’ particular performance specs and deliver capacity relatively quickly. For example, a customer could decide to deploy UPS equipment, or not. They could deploy water to the rack, or leverage air cooling, or even require a combination of air and direct liquid cooling. Either way, the decision doesn’t affect the long lead equipment we’ve already procured. Our customers can defer decisions like those until later in the process without extending the development timeline.

Explore more in our case study How Stream Delivered Over 40 MW of Dedicated Data Center Capacity in 16 Months for a Hyperscale Tech Company With an Ambitious Vision.