Despite the consolidation trend, some companies are continuing to branch out with their data centers for reasons including redundancy of the centralized data center for backup, a more comprehensive disaster recovery plan and better uptime at regional offices.

Indeed, some companies actually prefer this approach, and experts say it makes sense for organizations such as those with branch employees who can act as IT technicians or firms with locations dispersed on different continents.

"The satellite data center model is alive and well in companies that support multiple regional offices, such as banks, chain stores and insurance companies," said Charles King, a principal analyst at Pund-IT in Hayward, Calif. "The benefits are substantial for any industry where it's important and advisable to keep workers close to data and their IT infrastructure."

George Hamilton, an analyst at Yankee Group Research, said he's also in favor of satellite data centers in some instances.

"The advantage is leveraging existing space, rather than having to build additional data center capacity," he said. "With virtualization, you can make the satellite data centers appear as one big data center -- the users have no idea where the physical devices reside, nor do they care. It also builds in local redundancy -- unless the entire building is affected. You can also shut down one satellite data center and have another pick up the functionality during technology refreshes and upgrades."

Three kinds of satellites

One type of satellite data center is a "data room" on each floor. This was formerly known as an intermediate distribution frame (IDF) and is now commonly called a tenant technology room (TTR). Granted, these are not true data centers. However, the TTR of a large organization might be larger than an entire data center in a small company.

A second type is a regional office with a local data center that provides a subset of services, such as e-mail and document servers. Law firms are well known for having data centers at each office, serving just a few hundred employees.

A third is a data center located in a different state from the main data center entirely, usually to reduce constantly escalating utility costs. In this approach, the IT organization might be relocated to the remote data center, with the home office staying in the original location.

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