Facilities for data centers

Hello again!!

Trough these last weeks we’ve talked about many things to consider when designing a data center. Now it’s time to talk about facilities. This is a quite interesting aspect to consider because, besides the benefits it can take to the data center itself and the reduction of costs, it also takes into consideration the environment.

This post is going to focus basically on the following aspects:

• Where to locate the data center
• Which cabling system is better to use
• The type of electrical system
• Air conditioning and environmental control
• Fire system
• Access control

First, the location. This aspect is closely related to the air conditioning and energy consumption, because, as you might guess, using lots of servers, switches, routers… can overheat the place. So when choosing the physical location of the data center you have to consider some factors:

• Cooling and climate: the overheat of any device can cause a malfunction that can lead to reparations of the affected pieces. But using cooling systems can be very expensive. So choosing cooler climates can reduce costs because outside air can be used to chill the data center.
• Stable locations: to avoid any risk for the facility it’s important to place the data center where the probability to have any earthquake or hurricane or any other natural catastrophe is almost 0.
• Security: it’s also important to know the privacy legislation of the state where you want to place the data center because if you are offering a service to certain people, you must guarantee their data privacy.

It’s also important to mention that if we have 2 data centers, the principal and the backup, it’s better to locate them into different continents because, just in case we have any natural catastrophe only one data center would be affected.

The cabling system should be as hidden as possible, so visually we can have a clean data center. Having the cables hidden can also be favorable because it can avoid stumbling over any device due to the multiple cables we might have in the data center. But how do we hide them? Easy, just using a false ceiling.

It’s also important to use backup services, by this I’m referring to electrical lines and ISP providers. Thanks to this we can prevent that if any service goes down, we can still provide our services to our clients. It’s obvious that providers need to be from different companies.

Fire system should be installed because accidents happen and cooling systems can fail and device overheating can be too high. So as much protection provided less losses we can have in case of fire.

Finally, security!! To provide a good security system we have to provide both physical and network security. Related to physical security, we have to guarantee that only authorized people can enter and manage data, so cameras, biometric identifications (hand geometry or fingerprint scanners), monitor entries and exits, avoiding windows, vehicle entry points are some ideas of what is need to guarantee the maximum protection. But we don’t have to forget the network security because nowadays cyber crimes are increasing and data, also needs to be protected as much as possible.

Hope you liked and keep reading our next posts!!

See you.