Data Centre Design and Build

Our professional services consultancy team have a great track record in designing and building data centres of all shapes and sizes.  Either to add in extra server cabinets or build a complete green field N+N Data Centre in excess of 1000+ cabinets, we have the knowledge and relationships to be able to complete state of the art installations.

Building Data Centres is a very complex piece of work and unless you have the right team of people to work with can be prone to costly mistakes. Even if you already have an in house team or someone conducting the DC project build for you,  it is recommended that you think about the following items:

Things to think about when planning a large data centre:

  • Is it N+1 or N+N,  Which translates to will it need to be powered down for maintenance once per year or is there enough generators to never need to do this.
  • What connectivity do you need between sites,  will standard Ethernet circuits be sufficient or will you need to look at a fibre optic option.
  • Will you have complete redundancy to each cabinet i.e. Fibre and Copper cabling to each side of the cabinet in case you loose a link.
  • Will you require copper to each cabinet or can you just simply run diverse routes of copper to each cabinet and host 2 switches within the cabinet for diversity.
  • What sort of environment monitoring will you require,  i.e Temp / Moister / Security Access etc.  As these can be costly and often not written into the initial budget.
  • How are you going to migrate your existing systems to this site ? sometimes the migration of systems can be more costly then rebuilding them (Swing as opposed to shift).
  • Have you had an independent airflow and power study conducted.  It is recommended to get a third party to perform an air flow and power study on the site so you can ensure that your power will fail over correctly if in the event of PDU outage,  and also your DC will not over heat if you loose an air conditioning unit.
  • What thoughts are you giving to Disaster recovery,  are you ensuring that you have a good split of your production and backup systems and appropriate failover techniques in place.
  • What considerations have you given to virtualisation and VM Ware.  This technology is vastly being used to ensure continuity within system uptime but also consolidation of servers and shared resources.   Looking into VM Ware can save budget on a project and give your infrastructure a boost into the 21st century.