Guidelines for Design a Data Center
 

Hello every, I'm entering the world of data centers design. I've been reading some book as Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology (by Rob Snevely) but there are things not clear to me yet. Suppose I am designing a Data Center with the aim that it will grow in the future but for now only have at most three or four racks of equipment. My question is, if possible, without knowing the equipment will be installing, physically and logically design the data center without knowing yet to be carried inside.

Cheers and thanks in advance

Hi

The book you are reading is a good beginners guide but it’s now a little dated, DCs have changed a lot in the 9 years since this was written.

If I understand you correctly, your question is how can you design and plan your DC around equipment and networks that may not have even been designed yet.

The answer is simple; you design your DC around a set of parameters, not around a fixed set of IT e.g.
• Maximum and average Watts per rack
• Standard rack foot print & rack layout
• Maximum number of racks
• Rack Air flow options allowed
• Maximum/average number and type of Power connections per rack
• Maximum/average number and type of network connections per rack
Once you have set the above parameters you can start to design your DC. This part of the design will require a lot of important decisions to be made.

Now if you want to have your DC work with any IT, any air flow, any heat load, any number of power and network connections and any layout…. It cannot be down.

Hope I haven’t discouraged you

@raid
very good information to start with.

In literary meanings, data center is a physical place that use to store computer systems and other related components which includes telecommunications & storage systems that includes redundant or backup power supplies. Thus, it is a bit difficult job to design an required data center.However certain factors that needs to be taken care of are designing,Power Supply,The arrangement for Hot air exhaust,Redundant infrastructure etc.

Hmmmm. Lot's of factors would go into logically designing a data center, such as space available, location in the structure, environmental conditions, containment strategies available, greenfield build or retrofit, etc.

Infrastructure choices will also be dependent on how much control you have over the actual building itself. If you own the entire space, you can implement different solutions than if you lease the space and don't have control over the physical structure. It's pretty hard to convince a landlord to allow you to tear into the central HVAC system to access "free cooling".

Once the initial parameters are set, it is fairly easy to design with expansion in mind. You just don't want to design yourself into a corner by limiting power access. That is probably the most critical aspect to future proofing your data center. You can generally add more cooling as needed, but it gets very, very expensive to add more capacity from your electricity supplier once the utilities feed transformer is maxed out.