What is data centre design?

When the entire infrastructure of a data centre along with its IT resources and architectural layout is modelled and designed the process is termed as data centre design. The course of data centre design allows the entire logical conceptualization & commencement of the data centre before it is developed and implemented in the actual organization or IT location.

Ease in Data centre construction and robust data centre architecture can only be achieved if a good design is in place. A good data centre design is responsible for ensuring maximized service uptime and acts as a reliable powerhouse of connectivity for the network systems hosted in it. If the data centre design is outdated or poorly conceptualised it will not be able to meet the growing demands of today’s new-age companies.

How do you design a good data centre?

Building a data centre with a good design is extremely important as one must extract maximum output from the investment made in the infrastructure. How well a data centre is designed impacts the cost savings, the ease of scaling and the environmental effect. A good data centre should ensure that operational functions being carried out by employees are automated – this ensures reduced maintenance time and consistency in deployment in a single data centre or across multiple data centres as well. A workflow should be implemented to measure the recurring processes – this results in consistent and timely resource maintenance. All the activities should be transparent, auditable and should be able to be traced back to their source. Data centres should also have a robust cooling strategy to prevent outages and out-of-control expenses.

What are the components of the data centre?

The Data centre includes multiple components such as servers, switches, routers, firewalls, storage systems and application delivery controllers. These data centre components are responsible for storing and managing critical business data and applications and can be categorized as:

Storage infrastructure which is responsible for storing data which is the most valuable commodity in today’s day and age.

Network infrastructure is responsible for the connection of physical and virtual servers’ storage, data centre services and providing connectivity externally to the final users’ locations.

Computing resources are responsible for driving applications that are the engines of a data centre. The processing, memory, local storing and network connectivity for the same come from the computing resources.

Data Centre Design: 6 Important Tips to Consider?

Building a data centre involves a lot of time, effort and investment. It should be designed in such a way that the data centre capacity can be scalable and grow along with your business. A few tips to consider while designing the data centre are:

• Keeping extra space for expansion. This includes the floor space, server racks, cooling equipment and power requirement. These supporting functions should be able to support the expanded data centre.
• Focusing on the support staff so they can be more responsive to outages – this includes both IT professionals who are responsible for the hardware and software part as well as technicians who look after the wiring, monitor the humidity, cooling systems etc
• Maintaining an optimal temperature within the data centre to prevent any hardware catastrophe which can cost a lot to replace
• Having a good airflow management plan in place can bring down your cooling costs significantly
• Ensuring correct wiring from the start has its advantages such as reduced outages, quick troubleshooting and ease in scaling and adding new equipment
• Taking appropriate safety and security measures such as only the entry of authorized personnel due to the presence of expensive equipment and sensitive information

Why are data centres important to business?

Regardless of the type of data centre, businesses rely on data centres for multiple things – right from sharing information to storing information to making it accessible from any place, everything is enabled by data centres. Data centre facilities are critical to support Internet of things, machine learning, big data analytics, Artificial intelligence and more. With data centres –

• files and data can be shared and made accessible
• Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise resource planning are supported by data centres
• Virtual communication and collaboration can take place seamlessly
• IoT, ML, AR/ VR experiences, AI, Big Data Analytics is all made possible by data centres

Why Intelligent Monitoring is an Essential Part of Your Data Centre Design

The data centre layout and design are based on a network of computing and storage resources that allows smooth transfer and sharing of data and information. Storage systems, routers, servers, switches, firewalls, and application delivery controllers are the main components of any data centre design. While many organizations have state-of-the-art infrastructure, but they are not equipped with all the tools required to manage it effectively. They work on improving their security protocols but fail to offer customers a way to utilize or monitor their infrastructure. So, to provide meaningful benefits to all the customers and offer better control as well as visibility, intelligent monitoring is essential in an organization’s data centre design.

What are the different tiers of Data Centre Design?

Data centre tiers are an efficient way to explain specific kinds of infrastructure components that are being used by the organization’s data centre. Tier 1 data centre has the simplest infrastructure while Tier 4 data centre is the most complex, with many redundant components.

Tier 1: It has basic site infrastructure (with a non-redundant distribution path) and offers limited protection against physical events.

Tier 2: It has redundant-capacity component site infrastructure offering improved protection against physical events.

Tier 3: This type of data centre design has a concurrently maintainable site infrastructure. It protects against all physical events, provides redundant-capacity components and various independent distribution paths.

Tier 4: This is a fault-tolerant site infrastructure where the data centre provides the highest level of fault tolerance and redundancy.