Building data centers requires “appropriate flexibility”, says Nancy Novak, senior vice president of construction at Compass Datacenters. 

She has spent a lifetime in construction, and data centers were not initially her favorite thing to build, she told DCD in an interview at DCD>Enterprise in New York. But at Compass she found a unique challenge that she enjoys working on: standardization. 

“You have to be standardized enough that you are not killing the workforce trying to put this stuff in place, you stay competitive, you build on time and you can meet the needs of smaller clients, large cloud clients and edge point clients,” she said. 

The right level of standardization is “appropriate flexibility”, by which she means ”You’re not chaotic, you’re not so rigid that you can’t be flexible, you have enough standardization that you have this kit of parts that can be adjusted to meet someone’s needs, without having to start with a blank slate.”  

At Compass, she has three products: an enterprise build for clients that need localized control, a cloud offering for large customers, and an edge product.