Key considerations for your data centre design
Designing a data centre can be a challenging task. How to ensure reliability, flexibility, and scalability in the design of your data centre? How to ensure your investment creates value for the short- and long-term? In this blog, we discuss the key principles and considerations for your new data centre design.
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The initial design of a data centre is extremely important as it determines the facility's capacity, efficiency, reliability, and costs for construction as well for the operation. Numerous requirements need to come together in the design of your new data centre. A few highlighted requirements include the requirements from IT, local municipalities and the facility.
As IT and IT architectures continue to evolve, some aspects of data centre design can be particularly challenging. For example, developments in IT may lead to changes in the requirements for powering and cooling systems. To ensure that your data centre is capable of meeting future demands, a future-proof design is essential. In this blog, we will guide you through the key considerations and principles to keep in mind for your next data centre design.
As IT and IT architectures continue to evolve, some aspects of data centre design can be particularly challenging. For example, developments in IT may lead to changes in the requirements for powering and cooling systems. To ensure that your data centre is capable of meeting future demands, a future-proof design is essential. In this blog, we will guide you through the key considerations and principles to keep in mind for your next data centre design.
Key considerations
When setting up a new data centre, there are a few things that are important to consider. These key considerations for designing a data centre include:1. The total cost of ownership
Setting up a new data centre is a capital-intensive process. Starting from around €200.000 for a small edge data centre, capex construction costs may exceed €200 million for a large data centre, without even including the IT infrastructure.With data centres requiring a considerable investment of time and money to set up, build, and run, it is important to identify the total cost of ownership (TCO). To determine the total costs involved in your new data centre investment, we look at the capital investment (Capex) plus the running costs (Opex). When designing a data centre, key cost factors to include are total costs for powering, cooling and maintenance.
Choosing a more efficient data centre might require a higher capital investment at first, but can be beneficial due to the lower operating expenses. Therefore, determining the total cost of ownership (TCO) can assist you in spending your resources wisely.
2. Power efficiency
Power is key for data centres. Data centres need to be designed with a reliable power supply to ensure that the computer systems and related equipment can run continuously. These power supply systems typically include backup generators and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS).Considering the power requirements for cooling, ventilation, lighting systems, and the space for cables and cooling equipment is an important step before designing a new data centre. Data centres can require between one and three megawatts of power per square meter.
Ultimately, the power required to operate a facility should be minimised to have sufficient power available for IT.
3. Cooling
Data centres generate a lot of heat, failure of cooling this heat means failure of the data centre. Effective cooling is therefore essential to keep the temperature within acceptable limits. Cooling should also be designed flexibly, adapting to changes in the environment and the load on servers.Common cooling strategies used in data centres include air cooling, liquid cooling, and free cooling. Air cooling cools the equipment by using fans to move air around the data. Liquid cooling involves circulating a liquid coolant through the server racks. With free cooling, outside air is used to cool the data centre which reduces the need for air conditioning.
4. Connectivity
Data centres require high-capacity data communications connections. Without these connections, the data centre cannot operate. Therefore, resilient and multiple connectivity paths are part of the design and ensure network redundancy.5. Security
If there is one thing data centres cannot comprise, it is security. People and companies trust them with their most important data, so everything has to be in place to protect it. When designing a new data centre we need to look at both physical security, to prevent unauthorised access or fires, and cyber security. The physical security measures are access control, surveillance cameras, and locks. For fire suppression, systems need to be in place to protect equipment from potential fire hazards.6. Environmental considerations
Designing an efficient data centre is not only beneficial from an investment point of view, but also from an environmental perspective. Data centres can be designed with reduced environmental impact for the whole life span, or during construction, operation and at end of life. Furthermore, data centres can even contribute to a sustainable society by exchanging heat with surrounding cities.Scalability, flexibility and reliability principles
In addition to the key considerations, there are three important design criteria to keep in mind throughout the design of your new data centre. These principles are flexibility, scalability, and reliability of your data centre.Scalability
Creating a resilient data centre means allowing it for future expansion. This scalability concerns being able to expand the equipment and capacity of your data centre, which needs to be recognised already in the design phase. Therefore, thinking beforehand about the number of racks, server nodes and other components that need to be added in the future results in a more future-proof design. Also, the ability to add more power and cooling units should be considered.Flexibility
Flexibility is also key to a successful data centre design, as the needs of IT hardware and users may change over time. The ability to repurpose or reconfigure your facility to meet new requirements can be beneficial to include when designing a data centre. This includes the ability to add or reconfigure power, cooling, and networking components if necessary.Reliability
Data centre reliability is critical for your data centre. Therefore, the data centre design should ensure availability and functioning at all times, even in case of a power failure. This means including a variety of redundancy and backup systems in your facility, such as power and cooling backups, as well as a monitoring system to ensure that all components remain functioning.In sum, to set up your new data centre design there are several important considerations. How to create the most efficient balance between the operating costs and capital expenditures? How should the power and cooling topology look like to power and cool all the IT equipment? What measures are required to secure your new data centre? Lastly, seeing tightening regulations, how to embed sustainability and environmental principles in your new data centre design?
In addition to these considerations, we see that data centre design should be based on the principles of flexibility, scalability and reliability. This is to ensure your investment is not only adding value in the short-term but is a future-proof investment.
If you want to learn more about data centre design, you can find more details on data centre design phases and disciplines in a quick guide to data centre design phases and disciplines.
