Data Center design guidelines

Data Center design guidelines: main ideas

Have you ever wondered what are the main aspects should you considerate in your Data Center design in order to end up with a great New Generation Data Center? I’ve asked this same question myself multiple times and, surprisingly, the key factors a designer should take into consideration are almost every time the same. In this post I’d try to list and explain them in few words and, in future posts, I’ll surely focus on each one of them.

As I had also suggested in previous posts, reading some manufacturers guidelines, like this one form Extreme Networks is a great way to start when you are a little lost. Just take into consideration that they aim to inform you, but they are also trying to sell you stuff; keep an eye on that!

• Localization: The first issue of any Data Center design should be where it would be located; to answer this question, we ought to take into consideration a wide variety of aspects of every possible location:

1. Risks & Hazards: Natural disaster probability in the location (earthquakes (use this page to know last detected earthquakes), tornados, hurricanes, flooding, pollution, electromagnetic interferences…), physical security (ensuring than nobody will be able to physically access your servers).
2. Economic & sociocultural factors: Land cost, building cost, quality of energy and communication infrastructures, quality-of-life, work force, law and even economic incentives.

More info on localization can be found here.

• Required Services and protocols: It’s important to think, beforehand, what services will offer our Data Center, and what kind of protocols will it run, always focusing on automatization and resource optimization; key aspects will be the routing protocols, whether or not our datacenter will implement SDN, virtualization and how will the monitoring be implemented.

• Network Connectivity: We should know in advance the level of availability, robustness and scalability our Data Center design would most probably require and act consequently: if a high level of availability is necessary, we will need to design it with lots of redundancy and backup. We ought to ask ourselves what velocity and type of interfaces we will use (generally, 10GB Ethernet and Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) nowadays).

• Data Storage: Before our Data Center design is complete, we must know where and how are we going to store our data. There are lots of solutions for data storage; DAS, SAN, NAS, iSCSI. We need to decide if we will use any public or private Cloud Storage solution, and if we do, what information do we store in the cloud: Just backup? Some other non-critical information? Finally, we must take into account new trends, like Flash in front of more usual models like SAS or SATA.

• Security: Last but not least, nowadays it’s imperative to design a state of the art security policy. It should dictate physical security solutions, but also cybersecurity: firewalls, application control, user control, IPS, anti-spam, malware, spyware, data loss prevention… And even the security of our Cloud Storage (if we decided to use it), ensuring data protection via encryption.

If you get properly informed and think carefully about this topics, I’m sure you will be able to do a proper New Generation Data Center design in much less time and achieve much better results once you start making lower level decisions, because your general design will be well-thought and all those important focus points will have great consistency between them.

Now that we are approaching the end of this post, I have to admit that I haven’t said anything about a key idea you should really have thought of before starting your Data Center design; which Data Center architecture will it be based on? The next post on this blog will try to give you some ideas to help you answer this critical question! You should not miss it!