In this article we will understand basic steps of designing server room or datacenter. Datacenter designing requires planning for many aspects. In case of insufficient planning, you will end up with inefficient data center design which will face lots of issues. Hence it is very important to do planning of at least few basic things in advance to avoid surprises later. This planning mainly include space planning, Equipment sizing & Safety and monitoring of data center design build. One should follow all data center design guidelines for these three factors. Lets see it one by one.

Space planning of Server Room.

Before start construction of server room one should check server room design. Space planning of server room includes all aspects right from data center location selection to planning of positioning of all equipment. Once you decided number of rack and size of rack for which you are going to construct server room then space planning should be done in such a way that there should be space for all equipment and their smooth operation. While selection position of rack then care should be taken that there should be at least 800 mm clearance at front side of door less rack and at least 1200 mm clearance in front of rack with door, Hot aisel and cold aisel should be seperated clearly. There should be enough space to position of precision air condition. These AC requires clearance of 800 mm at front side and at least 600 mm from right hand side. If you are planning to place UPS and batteries in data center room itself then you need to leave clearances requires for of these equipment. Considering all these aspects server room size should be selected or if you have ready made space then base of these aspects one should decide on number of racks they can place.

Data center design equipment Sizing.

These is most important steps in server room design best practices. Data center equipment includes, number of racks, KVA rating of UPS and generator, KW rating of precision air conditioners, capacity of FM200 fire supression, selection of electrical switch gears and cables etc. Capacities of all these equipment should be on higher side considering future expansion and changing technologies. For example UPS should be at lease on 30% higher side to avoid surprises due to replacement of normal server with blade server or due to addition of new server. Similarly Server room ac should be on higher side. If it is chilled water CRAC units then reduction in cooling capacity due to temperature of inlet and outlet water should be factor.

Safety & Monitoring of data center.

Data center houses very costly servers and other equipment. More than that these server and hard discs stores very precision data that can effect operation of any business. Hence safety and monitoring of room that houses these precision equipment should be in place. All Data center should equipped with gaseous type fire suppression system which commonly known as FM200 fire suppression. All these door of data center room should have access control system to monitor entry and exit of each member. Whole premises internal and external should be monitored by CCTV. All equipment should be connected to BMS system. If BMS is not available in building then all these equipment should be monitor online via external facility monitoring system. Temperature and humidity level in datacenter room should be monitored by Environmental monitoring system which will send alerts to user if temperature and humidity crosses set values.