Trends of consolidation can be seen in the migration of servers to fewer, larger more automated datacenter locations, and also in consolidation of the units within those datacenters.

With the availability of advanced management tools and virtualisation techniques it's inefficient for engineers to be fiddling around commissioning individual servers, storage and racks. In a consolidated datacenter world, Prefabricated containers containing maintenence-free redundant units of datacenter fabric and processing power are more practical.

Rackable, SUN and others have helped drive container datacenter designs, and this commodity-based approach is now entering the mainstream. Microsoft's annoucement at the Data Center World conference last week was of a substantial 100+MW datacenter facility filled entirely with Microsoft C-Blox container datacenter.

Although this use of containerised datacenters in a Microsoft mega-facility is the first of its kind, the modular approach is also interesting for Scotland, as proposed in an earlier post on the renewable Energy Datacenter.

As James Hamilton, of Microsoft's Live  Platform Services team points out when considering where to locate computing power, "multiple smaller datacenters, regionally located, could prove to be a competitive advantage". Scotland's natural advantages around cheap power potential, addressing heat density and geopolitical position should make it worthy considering as a location for Europes datacenters.

Microsoft To Mainstream Containerized Data Centers With C-Blox -- Data Center -- InformationWeek