6 Important Checkpoints to Build an Efficient In-house Datacenter Infrastructure

There is always a debate between the comparison to building datacenter in-house vs. offshore or in the cloud. I will discuss this topic in my next article. But today my subject is how to build an efficient in-house data center infrastructure.

Building a data center is a very vast domain and needs a lot of planning and many key factors and areas to be worked out in detail. Here I am discussing only some of the simple but very important points to plan the infrastructure based on actual needs and future scalability. We should be careful not to overlook the scalability instead can upgrade and scale-up without forklifting.

1. Racks
2. Power System
3. Cooling System
4. Fire Suppression System
5. Structured Cabling
6. Network Bandwidth 

Racks

Racks are the important components of the data center, but their importance is often ignored. In fact, you will get in trouble if you choose a wrong size or even the design, which will cause many problems: heat, dust, and temperature can cause damage to equipment in racks, high cooling costs, messy cables, excessive noise, and safety leaks etc. 

Power System

Business activities and dependencies are closely related to the data center operations. Any accidental downtime in the data center will result in significant reputation and financial losses to business, so it is very important to provide a reliable power for the data center. This requires that the power protection system must have high performance in terms of redundancy, manageability, and scalability.

 Cooling System

The cooling system is also very critical because the heat of the data center is very high and the operation of the network equipment needs to be carried out at a constant temperature. The common cooling ways include free cooling, evaporative or adiabatic cooling, sealed cooling, and ceiling duct cooling etc. These cooling ways have their own merits and demerits and application. We should build an appropriate cooling system based on the specific need and application.

Fire Suppression System

It is most important, after securing the safety of personnel, to ensure that equipment suffers a minimum of damage. Clean agent systems, many of which use FM200, and inert gases. Clean agent systems extinguish fires by removing heat from them. Inert gases essentially suffocate the fire by depriving it of oxygen. Both clean agent and inert gas systems can be "excellent, reliable systems," if they are properly designed and commissioned. 

Structured Cabling

In the data center, network equipment is becoming more and more intensive. How to effectively manage a large number of cable and network equipment has become the problem if the cabling system is not managed properly. Structured cabling is a flexible, reliable, efficient cabling system, which can be divided into twisted pair copper cabling system (cat6, cat7 etc.) and fiber optic (multimode or single mode) cabling system.

Twisted pair copper cabling system is mainly used to achieve the short-distance (less than 100m) connection between devices for 1Gig to 10Gig links. Fiber optic cabling system can meet the demands for beyond 100m length, high bandwidth, high reliability, and high flexibility.

Network Bandwidth

With the advent of the cloud computing, large data, online video applications, the data center on the network bandwidth speed requirements are getting higher. Traditional data center 100 Gig has been unable to meet the application needs, and now 10 Gigabit servers have begun to become popular, the demands of the data center for the 40G / 100G network equipment and cabling system increasingly required.