How to Design a Datacenter?
At my current job, my role is Network Administrator. Currently we have grown outside of our small computer room, and need to work on upgrading to a bigger room.
We have available an older room upstairs which is a safe, just being used for storage. Let me stop here and say our building we currently occupy was a bank until the late 70s. So, yes, I am looking at moving into a safe.
The walls are concrete blocks, with the floor and ceiling solid concrete. There is an AC control unit in the room, originally designed for just that room alone. But that has not worked in about fifteen years or so. It is a good size space, and I feel will be perfect for us to move to.
I would like to move to a nice rack mounted system, climate controlled room, but one step at a time.
We have several problems we need to address first. One of them is we currently have the larger Proliant style of servers. And with over eight of them, space becomes a problem. As we replace older servers, I want to start moving to Blade style. But that is only cost effective if you replace three or more servers at one time.
Another issue is that our network is currently 10/100. We need to upgrade our switches and servers to gigabit before we move. This means new switches, concentrators, etc.
Heating and cooling. Where do I begin? This was not designed originally as the company only had a few servers, so they sat on the desktop at the back of the computer area. Since our company has grown, we have doubled the servers in just two years. We add a new server about every six months. The current room is so hot, it is almost unbearable (Can you say accident waiting to happen?) In order to understand this, the current room is about 6 foot by 10 foot. Now add all the servers, and three racks of storage shelves.
Our current wiring is hard to explain. The best guess I can offer is someone accidently cut the cables in the ceiling, and went out and bought a box of ethernet extenders instead of re-running new wire. And the wire currently runing into the room was put into the same conduit pipe that the electricity runs into the room with. (How the network still runs is an amazement to me).
We have a new generator for our building, added last year. It is not connected, but should be in about a month. I have no name brand on it, but I can tell you this, its huge. The gas tank on this thing is about half the size of my first car. I bring this up because I know I will need to plan for Surge protection and suppression in the new room.
So far I have been in contact with a few vendors as to Rack Mounts. Also I have been putting together requirements for power requirements, Heating/AC work, and cable pulling (I did enough cable pulling back in my Lantastic days, running coax).
I had the opportunity to visit a few locations around the state and see how they designed their data center. This gave me a few more ideas.
Our company has come a long way since it first started, but we still have more to do to move us technologically forward.
And for anyone that asks about backup and recovery, I run a full backup of every single server every night, and then move the tape into a vault in the morning. I have every thing in place right now so that a worst case scenario is we lose one day of work.
Anyways, I want to start using this blog as a record of where we are, and where we want to go.
If anyone has any useful or helpful ideas to offer, I'd love to hear about them.