The world will not see a single non-standardized “snowflake” data center built after May 2013.

That is the prediction George Slessman made exactly one year ago during a keynote at the Uptime Institute’s annual symposium in the Silicon Valley and Monday, during his keynote at this year’s symposium, the CEO of IO said he was sticking with it.

While cost per unit of processing, storage and network capacity continues decreasing rapidly, the cost of data center construction is doing exactly the opposite, Slessman said. Citing research by Turner Construction, he said construction costs in general have grown more than nine times between 1967 and 2008.

This means cost of the data center is becoming comparative to the cost of IT equipment it is built to support. “Data center infrastructure is the fastest growing cost of deploying IT today,” Slessman said.

Not only are they too expensive, traditional data centers take too long to build and may not be as secure as the IT systems inside. Passwords for password-protected facilities controls systems can still often be found right on the screens of these machines themselves, Slesssman said.

Because data centers have not traditionally been considered part of IT, none of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on IT security over the years has been spent on security at the data center layer, where a flick of a switch can take down an entire facility by shutting off power or cooling systems.

In Slessman’s opinion, the answers lie in the well-known concepts of standardization and manufacturing. Both work to improve quality while driving down cost and time to market. He proposed the data center module – such as his company’s IO Anywhere modules – a standard unit of delivery for data centers.

IO’s modules are pre-manufactured at the company’s factory in Phoenix and then shipped to the actual data center sites as needed. Customers can lease space within the modules in one of IO’s large data center facilities in the US or Asia, or have the modules deployed at their own locations.

Modularity was the theme of one of the opening sessions of the Uptime Institute event in Santa Clara, California. Analysts from the 451 Group – which owns the Uptime Institute – presented results of a recently completed a study of the economics of prefabricated modular data centers.

John Stanley, research analyst at 451 who oversaw the study, said economic benefits of modular data centers were largely centered around upfront cost rather than operational expenses.

The savings mostly come out of deferring the capital cost of building more capacity than is needed at the moment. This also leads to smaller property-tax expenses.

Andy Lawrence, a research director at 451, said proving economic advantage of modular data centers was crucial if vendors were to convince clients to choose them over traditional brick-and-mortar facilities. If the economics and other parts of the equation of modular solutions are equal to the traditional ones, the majority of clients are still more likely to go with traditional data centers, he said.

“Modular data centers need to have an economic advantage because the other key advantages are not necessarily clear,” Lawrence said.