What should I be concerned with when developing my data center?

There are lots of different areas you need to focus on. I will divide my answer into data center facility related areas of focus and IT areas of focus. As you might expect, the two tend to drive each other in a circular fashion.

Start with the IT side – you will need to clearly define the current state of the environment and how it might change when you migrate to the new location. The migration itself sometimes drives the changes out of necessity. You need to know both the size of the current environment and have projections of where it will go within a reasonable horizon of the new data center’s life. Where will the number of servers be in three years and five years? The one thing you can be sure of is that whatever growth number you choose will be wrong, but you will at least have some level of projections. You will also need to understand the extent you will virtualize the new environment, as well as how data will grow and what impact that will have on storage arrays, SANs, etc. The bottom line in this early mode is to use the IT numbers to project space and power requirements. Power will drive heat and hence air conditioning requirements.

When you get to the facility side, you will need to focus on such issues as redundancy and diversity. I am sure you can find the best practices in these areas. If not let me know and I can send you some good info. From the electrical perspective, focus on delivering the amount of redundancy that your business needs. Most data centers today use two redundant paths to deliver electricity to the equipment. Remember that this “dual path” needs to go from the PDU in the cabinet all the way to the utility feed from the street. One area to focus on here is to understand how much additional switching you would like to add to the design. In other words, if you lose one feed from the street (one of your paths in) do you want to switch the UPS that utility connection feeds to the other feed from the street to maintain redundancy upstream? Same can be said on the other side of the UPS. This redundancy discussion takes you into the discussion of service level agreements to your customers (and from your provider if outsourced). It also drives the decision of architectural Tier level. Also on the electrical side, pay specific attention to providing the ability to measure power consumption at all levels, from UPS and panels through cabinet level PDUs.

Electrical Redundancy is actually pretty simple compared to the Air Conditioning environment. There are many options in this area including air and water cooled systems, in line cooling systems, aisle containment, raised floor or overhead delivery, etc. This is a relatively complex discussion and more than I can do a good job describing here. Let me know if you would like to discuss this offline. My best advice here is to get a great Mechanical/Electrical Engineering firm (I can give you some references) that has experience in advanced designs – to leverage the most efficient architectures available today. Never, ever (ever, ever, ever) choose an engineering firm that sells equipment! You will absolutely get a combination of whatever they sell – never what is the best for the application. Also, focus on the HVAC control system, understanding sequencing of the air conditioners, both how they fail over and how they fail back. From a measurement standpoint, be sure to provide the ability to measure temperature and humidity levels within the equipment area. I usually like to be able to get at least one point of measurement per cabinet position and many organizations measure many more points. Do not skimp here.

For both the electrical and mechanical systems, make certain that the design takes into consideration what happens when there is scheduled (or unscheduled) shutdowns of the supplies. In a multitenant building electrical and condensed water risers are occasionally shut down for maintenance, to add tenant taps, etc. What happens if both your primary and redundant air conditioning systems rely on the same condensed water riser? Make sure there is a back-up plan here.

When construction is started, ask to have the Communications Carrier (Telco) room made available first. I usually can get this room turned over to IT weeks to a month or two before the rest of the data center and this can work wonders in completing the carrier installs in parallel with the data center build-out.

When the data center is ready be sure to schedule a formal commissioning test of each of the major critical systems (UPS, Air Conditioning, Electrical switches, generators, etc.) The commissioning of the Air Conditioning should include the control automation and all of the failure modes should be tested.

While all of the design and construction work is going on, the IT organization needs to be working hard on developing the plan on how all of the systems will migrate over. Some of the key areas to focus on here is the methodology of the migration. This can include new instances of an application in the new data center, which can be either physical or virtual instances, or the relocation of the physical equipment to the new environment.

When migrating applications two standard areas to focus on are IP sensitivities and data migration. Your equipment will clearly be moving to a new IP subnet, which may have the effect of breaking the application. Best to test for this before migration. Data migration can be a huge undertaking. People often immediately jump to the solution of moving the data over the wire, however when the datasets get very large this becomes problematic in a functioning environment. The window to move the data may be smaller than the time it would actually take for a large dataset.

My experience on Data Center builds is that Facilities owns the construction and IT drives the requirements. Make certain that there is a very close collaboration between the groups for this to work at all. Most of all get a super PM that has done this many times. This is absolutely no place to learn the business.

Finally, one of the other members of the data center group also suggested you put some detailed initial focus into the legal aspects of the relationship. If outsourced this means SLAs, if company owned make certain all of the required rights are in the lease and in both cases the appropriate remedies if you do not get what you contracted for.

These are a few of the big issues that come to mind. Most all of these issues are equally important of you are building or going to an outsourced location.