Private Datacenter in Hong Kong

I am contemplating building a private data center for my small web hosting company. I have a warehouse in Hong Kong (New Territories) and have begun searching for bandwidth carriers who can deliver to my location.

I dont think I will need the raised flooring or a desiel generator or anything fancy like that. I expect to allocate enoughs space from my warehouse for about 20 racks and use 2 - 4 standard air conditioners.

I would appreciate any input on what would be needed in starting my own small data center for 20 racks and what type of investment I should be looking at.

Thanks for the input!

[Keith]

First off, welcome to DCT and your quest to build a datacenter!

In order to fully answer this question properly, it is a must that we get answers regarding the specifics of your desired datacenter. You mention you own a small hosting company with 20 racks. Are these racks fully populated? What types of servers are they? what types of cabinets do you plan on using? What size of AC unit do you consider to be "standard"? What types of power are available? How much power is available? How much is needed?

In the hosting industry, your datacenter is what makes or breaks your company the fastest. You mentioned that generators are "fancy". Lets face it, if you do not have a generator, and you lose power, your customers will be very unhappy!

I would strongly recommend that you brainstorm the requirements and priorities thatyou have for the datacenter and take a look at other datacenters in the area. The hosting business is extremely satturated so in order to be considered as a feasable hosting company, you should look in to as much redundancy as you can possibly buy. I go by the belief that a redundant datacenter is a happy datacenter.

I have won a lot of new accounts, in the past, simply by having a somewhat impressive datacenter. We have had potential customers walk through our datacenters and then they would sign up in the parking lot.

You will learn from reading my posts that I brainstorm a lot in my replies and often ramble. I hope some of this rambling makes sense. I look forward to hearing more of your plans and providing you assistance as you need it. Good luck!