Key considerations for your data center design

The initial data center design is extremely important as it determines the facility's capacity, efficiency, reliability, and costs for construction as well as for the operation. Numerous requirements need to come together in the design of your new data center. 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 center 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 center 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 center design.

When setting up a new data center, there are a few things that are important to consider. These key considerations for designing a data center include:

1. The Total Cost of Ownership

Setting up a new data center is a capital-intensive process. Starting from around €200,000 for a small edge data center, capex construction costs may exceed €200 million for a large data center, without even including the IT infrastructure.

With data centers 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 center investment, we look at the capital investment (Capex) plus the running costs (Opex). When designing a data center, key cost factors to include are total costs for powering, cooling, and maintenance.

Choosing a more efficient data center 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 centers. Data centers 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 center. Data centers can require between one and three megawatts of power per square meter.

Ultimately, the power required to operate a facility should be minimized to have sufficient power available for IT. Entangl's platform can help achieve efficient power usage by optimizing design choices that impact power consumption and by linking operational data to power strategies.

3. Cooling

Data centers generate a lot of heat; failure to cool this heat means failure of the data center. 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 centers 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 center, which reduces the need for air conditioning.

4. Connectivity

Data centers require high-capacity data communications connections. Without these connections, the data center 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 centers cannot compromise, 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 center, we need to look at both physical security, to prevent unauthorized access or fires, and cybersecurity. The physical security measures include 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 center is not only beneficial from an investment point of view but also from an environmental perspective. Data centers can be designed with reduced environmental impact for their entire lifespan, including construction, operation, and end of life. Furthermore, data centers 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 center. These principles are flexibility, scalability, and reliability.

Scalability

Creating a resilient data center means allowing it for future expansion. This scalability concerns being able to expand the equipment and capacity of your data center, which needs to be recognized 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 center 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 center. This includes the ability to add or reconfigure power, cooling, and networking components if necessary. Entangl's platform can assist in managing these changes efficiently by identifying potential bottlenecks and optimizing resource allocation.

Reliability

Data center reliability is critical for your data center. Therefore, the data center 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.

Conclusion

In sum, to set up your new data center 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 center? Lastly, seeing tightening regulations, how to embed sustainability and environmental principles in your new data center design?

In addition to these considerations, we see that data center design should be based on the principles of flexibility, scalability, and reliability. Entangl offers solutions to streamline these design processes, helping to create a future-proof investment that adds long-term value.