Building an Ideal Data Center

On deciding to build your own data center, you have to follow certain guidelines. Building a datacenter is not something that will last for a day or two; it should easily take around three months or more to have it properly setup. You may like to consult a data center expert to formulate a standards-based design structure for your data center as per your requirements. Speaking of standards, the design should be such that you can scale it up as per your requirement. You shouldn't end up

with over or under-capacity in the data center. Let's look at some of the key guidelines.

Design factors



Like for buildings, there are architects for data centers as well, who specialize only in building data centers. They essentially have an IT background and understand technology well. The systems manager needs to sit with these specialized architects to formulate a design structure. Ideal design of a datacenter should be flexible enough in terms of expansion and should be able to last for at least ten years. The height of the datacenter room should be between 14-15 feet (3 feet below raised floor rising up to 9.5 feet from the raised floor to false ceiling and 2 feet from false ceiling to shell). The raised floor should be able to take a load of 300 pounds per square foot. Use fire-proof walls for building a datacenter. The entrance to the main datacenter should be separate from the entrance to other facilities like your networking room, broadband room etc. A separate area needs to be created within the data center premises for keeping the UPS. Dedicated space also needs to be created adjacent to the main data center for controlling it. Generator room should be kept outside the data center. While designing a data center, keep the air-dynamics in mind. There should be proper ventilation and cool airflow in all sections of the data center. Whatever method you choose, you have to ensure that all equipment kept inside the racks remains cool. Also keep in mind that usually rack and blade servers take in air from the front and blow it out from the back. So their front should always get cool air, while the hot air from the back should not be allowed to circulate. 

Redundant infrastructure 



A data center is built for reliability and fail-safe operation. For that it must have some amount of redundancy built-in. From servers, storage to power, everything can be made redundant. All this of course doubles the cost, so make sure this is planned out very carefully. Keep the most critical elements redundant. 

Power conditioning 



Power planning is another key area that one should consider while designing the data center. Assess the load requirements for your data center. The load includes not only your racks and blades, but also the air-conditioning, networking equipment, security system, UPS etc. You could even install a power logic management system, which will control you entire power conditioning. Suppose the data center faces a power cut from the external power grid, the UPS should take charge of the entire data center except the cooling plant. Then the UPS system sends a signal to the power control unit to resume power from the standby source (generators). Power control unit starts the generators and its programmed logic switches back the power to the standby power. This standby power is meant for powering each and every element of the data center. 

Sufficient cooling 



So much equipment inside a data center is likely to generate a lot of heat, which can damage equipment and reduce overall performance. Hence, it's very important to keep your entire data center cool up to 20°C. Install a dedicated cooling plant for your data center, install aircon inside the data center, wherever it's required. Design the cooling system in such a way that each area of the data center gets uniform cooling. Another important part of data center design is that of the cool air supply and hot exhaust return paths control. Ideally the hot exhaust air from the equipment would be taken directly back to the cooling system without the opportunity to mix with the surrounding air or be drawn into the intakes of equipment. Provide cooling to your data center both from bottom (raised floors) and over-head outlet. Keep the front of the racks in-front of a perforated raise floors, cool air can be exposed directly to the storage/servers. Better cooling of a data center leads to improved performance and lesser down time. 

Physical security 



A data center carries the critical business applications and data of an organization. Hence, physical security is needed to safeguard the data center from any external attacks. The access to the data center should be kept restricted to certain levels of personnel. Install swap card access and bio-metric authorization devices on each entrance of a data center. If possible keep the racks inside a cage and install a digital lock on them. Install twenty-four hour surveillance cameras inside and out side the data center premises. And to add more, you can put up motion detectors inside the main datacenter area such that on intrusion, the motion detectors should raise the alarm to the authorities. Also place some guards on sensitive areas such as generator room, cooling plant, broadband enclosure and main entrance of the data center. 

Centralized management

There should be a separate area dedicated for a centralized management of the entire data center. Here, set up a Network Management System (NMS) to monitor the health of servers and data storage arrays. Data center manager can sit here and manage the data servers and the applications running on

them. You can also put monitors for your surveillance cameras over here. Plus you can check the physical attributes like data center temperature, access control, battery status, oil level in the generators, detection of hot spots etc. 

Fire prevention 



Be ready for worst, you can't predict fire, as in when and how it can & will cause disasters. So you should install a full-fledged fire prevention system in the datacenter. This includes fire alarms, smoke and fire detectors. Use gas based fire fighting agents inside the datacenter, for gas based agents will kill any erupted fire without damaging the equipmentdatacenter. To be safer, fire proof material should be used to build the entire datacenter. Water should be your last resource in worst cases. So also install over-head water-based fire prevention system.