Data Centres
Where are they located?
Data Centers are located all over the world. There are over 8000 data centers world wide.
Top 20 Countries
Data Centers by Region
Typical Design
How to design and build a data center
A data center is the technological hub of modern enterprise operations. The data center provides the critical IT infrastructure needed to deliver resources and services to business employees, partners and customers around the world.
Currently, data center architectures include traditional on-premises centers, colocation facilities, cloud data centers, edge computing centers, and centers utilizing modular or containerized designs. Each serves different needs and scales according to demand.
Constructing a data center commonly starts with thorough planning of the layout and infrastructure, followed by site selection, calculating power and cooling requirements, and ensuring compliance with industry standards. The actual construction phase carefully adheres to the predefined architectural design and planning.
Design standards for data centers are guided by industry best practices and certifications such as those from Uptime Institute’s Tier Standard and ANSI/TIA-942. These standards dictate the specifications for redundancy, fault tolerance, and overall reliability.
Data Center Design & infrastructure Standards
Below are just some of the major data center design and infrastructure standards:
• Uptime Institute Tier Standard. The Uptime Institute Tier Standard focuses on data center design, construction and commissioning, and it is used to determine the resilience of the facility as related to four levels of redundancy/reliability.
• ANSI/TIA 942-B. This standard involves planning, design, construction and commissioning of building trades, as well as fire protection, IT and maintenance. It also uses four levels of reliability ratings, implemented by BICSI-certified professionals.
• EN 50600 series. This series of standards focuses on IT cable and network design and has various infrastructure redundancy and reliability concepts that are loosely based on the Uptime Institute's Tier Standard.
• ASHRAE. The ASHRAE guidelines -- which are not specific to IT or data centers -- relate to the design and implementation
What are the main components of a data center?
There are two principal aspects to any data center: the facility, and the IT infrastructure that resides within the facility.
These aspects coexist and work together, but they can be discussed separately.
Facility
The facility is the physical building used for the data center. In simplest terms, a data center is just a big open space where infrastructure will be deployed. Although almost any space has the potential to operate some amount of IT infrastructure, a properly designed facility considers the following array of factors:
•Space. There must be sufficient floor space, a simple measure of square feet or square meters to hold all the IT infrastructure that the business intends to deploy now and in the future. The space must be located on a well-considered site with affordable taxes and access. The space is often subdivided to accommodate different purposes or use types.
•Power. There must be adequate power in watts, often as much as 100 megawatts to operate all the IT infrastructure. Power must be affordable & clean, meaning free of fluctuation or disruption and reliable. Renewable and supplemental/auxiliary power must be included.
•Cooling. The enormous amount of power delivered to a data center is converted into computing, i.e., work and a lot of heat, which must be removed from the IT infrastructure using conventional HVAC systems, as well as other unconventional cooling technologies.
•Security. Considering the value of the data center and its critical importance to the business, the data center must include controlled access using a variety of tactics, ranging from employee badge access to video surveillance.
•Management. Modern data centers typically incorporate a building management system (BMS) designed to help IT and business leaders oversee the data center environment in real time, including oversight of temperature, humidity, power and cooling levels, as well as access and security logging.
Infrastructure
An infrastructure represents the vast array of IT gear deployed within the facility. This is the equipment that runs applications and provides services to the business and its users. A typical IT infrastructure includes the following components:
•Servers. These computers host enterprise applications and perform computing tasks.
•Storage. Subsystems, such as disk arrays, are used to store and protect application and business data.
•Networking. The gear needed to create a business network includes switches, routers, firewalls and other cybersecurity elements.
•Cables and racks. Miles of wires interconnect IT gear, and physical server racks are used to organize servers and other gear within the facility space.
•Backup power. Uninterruptible power supply (UPS), flywheel and other emergency power systems are critical to ensure orderly infrastructure behaviour in the event of a main power disruption.
•Management platforms. One or more data center infrastructure management (DCIM) platforms are needed to oversee and manage the IT .
Reason for Design
Just to be clear there isn’t one typical design for a data center.
Although a number of providers like to duplicate their design across a number of projects, you will usually see differences. The differences between companies are usually significant but the fundamentals are the same. Each company is trying to create a design that maximises power efficiency. The more efficient the power the cheaper it is to run the facility.
A good example of this is the “Hot Aisle” “Cold Aisle” design.
“Hot Aisle” “Cold Aisle” Design
To maximise cooling efficiency the design team aligned the servers in such a way as to create a “Hot Aisle”. This is hot because the cool air from the CRAC units is sucked into the servers. As it passes over the hot servers it cools them down and the cool air heats up. This hot air then goes into the “Hot Aisle” and is circulated back into the CRAC units to be re-cooled and sent back to the data
Typical Layouts
CSA (Civil, Structural & Architectural)
The underground services (CIVIL) if often the most complex part of the CSA packages.
This is a series of trenches, chambers and cable ducting that surrounds the perimeter of the building with a number of “pop ups” within the building.
The section in the blue circle would be of particular difficulty and there are a number of cross over points. If you try and visualise it, they will all be a different levels and need to be installed in the right order. Below is a section taken of the area in the model.
The CSA on a Data Centre is not as dominant as it would be on a commercial or healthcare project.
They are often classified as large warehouses. Its typically a steel frame with cladding.
Foundations are dependent upon the local substrata.
Electrical
The Electrical discipline is typically the largest and most costly on a Data Centre Project.
The electrical is all systems associated with getting power to the equipment. Its made up of but not limited to -
- Sub Station
- Lighting
- Switch Rooms
- Small Power
- Transformers
- Fire Detection
- UPS Security
- Generator Access Control
The power comes from the national grid to a local substation.
The voltage from the national grid is too high so it needs to be reduced. This happens by going through the transformer. The voltage is now considered Low and that is where you get LV cable from. This LV cable goes to the Local Switch Room (EQX call these Switch Rooms (MeWall’s) which is typically inside the building.
The power then goes from here to the PDU (Power Distribution Units) inside the data halls then these feed the servers. We will cover into more detail the Electrical Systems in another training sessions.
Mechanical
The mechanical discipline on the Data Centre is generally the smallest out of the CSA, Elec and Mech. The main packages are
• Cooling
• Ventilation
• BMS (Building Management System)
• Fire Protection (Gas, Sprinkler)
• DWS (Domestic Water Services)
Cooling
Data Centers produce a huge amount of heat. This mainly comes from the servers in the data halls and the electrical equipment in the Switch Rooms. This equipment needs to be kept cool or it will overheat and shutdown.
To cool the servers the data hall is often surrounded by a cooling corridor. In this corridor you will have mechanical equipment that pumps cool air into the data hall through louvred panels. These cooling units are called various things. CRAC’s, CRAH, SCU’s.
However on EQX projects they are called the XSCALE CRAY Walls.
This mechanical equipment is fed from an often external “Chiller” which produces the cool water that is used to cool the air going into the data hall.
The cold water running through the chilled pipework cools the air around the pipework.
This cold air is then sucked in through the XSCALE CRAY Wall and into the data hall where it cools the servers.
We will cover into more detail the Mechanical Systems in another training sessions.