Building with modern data center design in mind

Introduction

Modern data center design involves planning carefully for the center's location, hardware and building infrastructure. It's certainly not as simple as "build warehouse, insert computers."

This guide covers capacity planning tactics, tips for building facilities, hardware selection strategies and monitoring a data center's infrastructure.

1Capacity planning 101-

Modern data center design 101: Capacity planning

Building a data center or server room without a strategy for capacity is like filling a pool before you find out how much water it can hold. Some factors involved with capacity planning include virtualization, redundancy and a healthy dose of unpredictability. This section includes a range of articles that illustrate the importance of capacity planning in your modern data center design project.

2Building Facilities-

Ideas for data center facilities planning

Capacity planning, while vital, is only one piece of the puzzle involved in modern data center design. Another piece is the data center's physical requirements. Server, network and storage systems all have power and cooling requirements. Designing for efficiency is essential to keeping costs low, but if you go too low with power and cooling, a disaster can happen. Take a look at these resources to see how to plan for a new data center and upgrade the facilities in an existing structure.

3Choosing hardware-

Choosing potential hardware systems: Modular and converged options

There is no single rule for selecting the hardware to go into a brand-new data center. Converged infrastructure and modular design are two modern data center design options that, for some shops, might be exactly what the business needs -- or might not. Here are some positives and some potential downsides of a converged infrastructure and modular construction.

4Our experts-

Meet the Experts

5Glossary-

Glossary