Designing the Data Center of Your Dreams
A modern data center uses good power and cooling strategies to optimize efficiency and uptime. However, power and cooling sufficiency is no longer enough to ensure this result.
Designing a Data Center Involves Multiple Components
Evaluate the following components when designing a data center for optimal uptime and control. Top designers, like Saraval Industries, realize that there can be no inefficiency or a less than optimal command center to achieve user goals for accuracy and immediacy of access. Best practices demand the maximizing of the following components, at a minimum.
Performance
Users expect fast access to their data. Many users also realize the complexity of data center reliability, particularly with the heavily-packed density of server data. Users who are not IT gurus (most of them), value reliability above all other considerations.
They really don’t care how it’s done as long as it gets done. Optimizing network performance involves proper cabling, using outstanding servers, equally good racks and cabinets, and managing the miles of cables successfully.
Modular Considerations
Modular solutions are vitally important as data center equipment, typically, is swapped out and replaced after around five years. The more complex your data center, some equipment may need replacing sooner than five years of service.
Modular designs take center stage when some, but not all, equipment needs updating. For example, if the servers are not overheating but airflow needs improvement, you want modular options to save company money.
Space Considerations
Do you have the expansion capability to meet future client demands? You will need not only physical space, but quality infrastructure that allows the flexibility meet increased user demands for more data storage, without reconfiguring the entire data center – or, even worse, moving the whole center to a new location. The more successful your data center, the more you need this flexibility.
Accept that space will always be at a premium in most data centers, as senior management doesn’t want to pay for unused, extra space when they are unsure of technology developments or future user demands. Wasting money is never a best practice positive. For example, your infrastructure should include racks and cabinets with higher weight limits than you currently need. This gives you flexibility to expand without needing additional physical space.
Design Experience Considerations
You need the “right” strategic partner to design the most efficient data center for your company. Experience in designing data centers is a vital consideration. Top firms, like Saraval Industries, have the experience to ensure you will have optimal workflow for your staff. Your users will be happy as will your data center personnel.
Designing a data center for maximum efficiency is a logistics-heavy project. It’s challenging for a “first-timer” to anticipate all the important minutiae that can make or break an efficient data center. Most inexperienced data center designers cannot foresee all the potential issues that may arise. Those with successful design experience earned in multiple industries are the most reliable designers for you. While we dislike using clichés, you want a data center designer, who’s “been there and done that.”