Cisco Systems has announced the availability of its Containerized Data Center for commercial customers. The CDC is a modular data center in a weatherized container with an open architecture and an optimized management platform.

The company said the CDC solutions are a way to quickly "expand, complement or even replace traditional fixed 'brick and mortar' data centers," reducing capital expenditures and potentially reducing operating expenses by up to 30 percent. It added that a key aspect of the CDC is its Operations 360 management system, which provides capacity planning, deployment support, real-time monitoring, historical reporting and trending, and space and environmental analytics.