Small, Medium, Big
 

If you could have your dream size of data center what would it be and why? What size do you have now and why?

Yep that would be the definition of dream. If you answer those questions in which you have brought up you would indeed be building the ultimate dream DC for yourself. So lets hear what you would do.

from a business managers point of view
 

Well First and foremost the datacentre would have to look spotless. Id say size wise it would be 3 or 4 floors with varied power and cooling configs to suit customer needs.

It is really embarrising when you take potential customers around a data centre and theres wireing, pipeing and boxes and crap everywhere.

Next it would have all major carriers in there so customers can be on-net.

PCI and ISO compliance(s).

Good access for customers to get kit in and out of the DC.

very true.

yeah would love a spotless DC but i think that's impossible. tidy yes, spotless no.

Hi, I'm new here so be gentle... I think you're looking at this a bit backward. You'll want to look at what your current needs are and expected growth. Then you need to compile this data on several fronts - such as Power, floor space, rack units, cooling etc.

The actual building is cheap to build by comparison to the environmental infrastructure. Knowing this, if you determine your maximum power and feed this into the building - then you should build all of your support features around this number. An example is that if you need 6 megawatts, feed at least 7-9 into the building. If you know that a blade server takes X rack units and you will be able to support X amount based on 20kW - 40kW per rack you can find the amount of rack units you'll need. You can then identify the quantity of racks and the space needed to house this number of racks.

The cooling required should absolutely and always match the total power you brought into the building via BTU conversion. You must also understand how you want to break up the space. You can have one massive Data Center with smaller side rooms for the power and cooling equipment or you can have multiple smaller Data Centers with equipment rooms - this is more of a personal preference.

I have my opinions on size surely and I have my design preferences, but you always have to do the math to get it right. As far as cleanliness and orderliness - make it happen, set the rules and stick to them. I have no misrouted wiring and I have nothing on the floor. Dirt and corrugate is a servers worst enemy...

The size of the DC should be big enough to meet the mandatory requirements. I think the optimum size of the DC vary according to the requirement. It should be scalable to accomodate future needs.

Hi Princee18,

Currently I have three Pods one is for low density or legacy systems and one is for high density systems, blades and clusters such as a Cray multi-rack, and the third Pod is for future growth. As the third Pod is built the 1st Pod is phased out and built out with the next leading technology type. The Pod are long and narrow to support the CFM of the CRAC units place perpendicular to the hot aisle.

ssims, your Pod approach sounds like an excellent way to accommodate changing needs for distribution. I'm interested in how your data center will cope with the need for increased power and cooling capacity when the time comes.

Ken

Hi KenB,

In our 3rd Pod we have conduit already in place to receive additional power into the building - we also have an established location for the next equipment yard. We currently have 7 mg into the building with the ability to add 7 mg more when the time comes - of course all at a cost. What we didn't want to do was build everything out and with the technology changing so quickly - and not need it as suppliers attempt to reduce, not just the size of the box (space), but also kW. Since there are many ways to reduce the kW needs within a DC such as spray cool or silicon changes in the chip or cooler hard drives etc, we wanted to be very prudent about our affect on the power usage. When we built the DC we were just entering VM Hosting and this has proven to be a huge savings as well.