Network Computing contributing editor Kurt Marko came out with a contrarian view during Tuesday's "Data Centers: The Next 12-18 Months" panel at Interop: The data center you can build won't be as feature-rich as a co-location facility that can focus on bringing in sufficient power, cooling, and networking and ensuring that it's all redundant and fault tolerant.

You can expand and contract at a co-lo facility far more efficiently than you can when you own the data center, Marko explained. Besides, the cloud gold rush is causing lots of facilities to be built before demand emerges. That means there may be lots of cheap space in the next few years.

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