Primary Requirement For Building Data Center

Written by Julianus Yu

The data center’s primary service is to provide care and feeding for all equipment housed within it. The practical requirements of a data center are as follows:

• Provide a physically secure location for servers, storage, and network equipment.

• Provide 24 / 7 network connectivity for equipment within the data center to devices outside the data center.

• Provide necessary power to operate all equipment.

• Provide an environment where the temperature and humidity are controlled within a narrow range and air is exchanged at an adequate rate.

Required Physical Area for Equipment and Unoccupied Space
Physical capacity is defined as available space for servers, storage, network devices, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), power panels, breakers, and floor to support the weight of the equipment. Note that approximately 50 percent of the space is occupied by racks or stand-alone hardware. The remaining physical area is used for aisles, ramp, space next to walls, breaks between rows of racks, perforated tile spaces to let cold air from subfloor plenum to the racks, and open space to let exhaust air from racks to the HVAC plenum.

Required Power to Run All the Devices
To protect against power failures, uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) must be present in every data center. They kick in when electricity fails and can provide power for up to an hour (some UPSs can run longer). If the utility company has frequent long-duration outages, generators are required. The first thing you must know is the power requirement of the devices. That will, in turn, help decide your power needs:

• the number of breakers,

• outlet types,

• single-phase or three-phase,

• layout of data-center wiring,

• and watts per rack.

The unit of power (for each piece of equipment) is watts. Power (or watts) is the product of volts and amperes. Avolt, in turn, is the unit of electric potential between two points and is the product of resistance (Ohms) and current (amperes). Voltage is the electrical equivalent of water pressure. Just as excess water pressure can burst pipes if the pressure is too high, excess volts to equipment will damage it.

Required Cooling and HVAC
HVAC is required to keep the devices cool and maintain low humidity within the data center. Cooling requirements are measured in British thermal units (BTUs) per hour. The air-flow pattern is very important in cooling the equipment. It is controlled by the under-floor pressure, which, in turn, depends on the HVAC unit and relative placement of solid and perforated tiles on the raised floor.

Required Weight
It is critical to know the weight of each rack without any content (server, storage device) inside it and the combined weight of all the racks. Add the weight of all devices (approximate estimate) that will be placed in the racks. That will give you an idea of the weight that the data-center floor will be subjected to. Load capacity of the floor tiles must be accounted for before rolling equipment into the data center. It is impractical to replace floor tiles in a live data center.

Required Network Bandwidth
The bandwidth offered by the Internet service provider (ISP) should at least be equal to the data center’s inbound and outbound bandwidth specifications. Most data centers have mission-critical servers and need 24 × 7 service uptime. The connection to the Internet must be redundant with two or more feeds from different ISPs. Also, network devices, sources of backup power (UPS or generators), and cooling units must have built-in redundancy.

Budget Constraints
In practise you will find that the toughest thing about designing and constructing a data center is staying within the allocated budget. Here is a list of budgetrelated considerations:

• What is the budget amount?

• Is the amount adequate to design and construct a data center, given the set of expectations such as capacity, uptime requirements, building codes, and so forth?

• Is there enough money to set up all mandatory elements? Should the UPS, generators, HVAC, and Internet connectivity have built-in redundancy?

• Do you need redundant links to the Internet via different ISPs?

• At what stages will the funds be released to pay for incurred expenses?