More data centers in Spain are taking interest in international certification and modular solutions, while others are consolidating and looking to the Cloud to overcome financial constraints, according to experts in the Spanish-speaking data center market.

According to HP Business Developer for Critical Facilities Services Gregorio Fernandez, data center operators in Spain are starting to realize more alignment between IT and facilities and in 2012 will start looking to modular solutions to help meet these needs.

“Customers have demanded services and vertical support from the business management processes through infrastructure and IT services,” Fernandez told FOCUS’s Latin American site.  

“Due to restrictions on investment, the industrialization of the data center will provide a big boost to modular data centers and in our case FlexDC (the HP Butterfly concept) and HP EcoPOD (HP’s containerized data center products)”

He said as facilities become more complex, data center operators in Spain will look to incorporate Data Center infrastructure Management technologies. This are is likely to take off in 2012.

Cooling will also remain a key topic along with cloud computing in 2012 as companies struggle with tighter budgets.

Spanish power quality company PQC’s founder Garceran Rojas said data centers in Spain have already been carrying out consolidation and that “whether at the level of infrastructure, platform or software, the Cloud has become more popular”.

Data center engineer Javier Zazo of design consultancy Arx said that interest in cogeneration projects has risen with a number of grants becoming available in Spain. He said companies, feeling the economic strain, are looking for more ways to make the data center efficient to realize cost savings.

Quark is another design consultancy, and its director Ricardo Abad said we can expect to see overall growth in Spain’s data center sector, but not from new builds. Instead, existing facilities will be looking to expand to make way for new demands on IT, especially those in the medium-size bracket.

“But this will be nothing like the square footage and power we have seen in 2011,” Abad said.

These trends for the Spanish market were first published in FOCUS En Espanol – our Spanish magazine covering the data center - by Virginia Toledo. You can see the original here, and sign up to read FOCUS updates in Spanish here.