Essential Guide

Browse Sections

BACKGROUND IMAGE: iSTOCK/GETTY IMAGES

Building with modern data center design in mind

Last updated:June 2013

Editor's note

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.

1Ideas 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.

2Choosing 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.

3Meet the Experts

4Glossary

-ADS BY GOOGLE

SearchWindowsServer

SearchServerVirtualization

SearchCloudComputing

Close