How Would You Build a Datacenter?

InOverOurHeads asks: "Some of my coworkers and I are building a new datacenter for our company. We're a growing startup, we have about 50 servers now and expect to have about twice that before too long so building to grow is key. Now that we're about $15,000 in to the project, it is looking and feeling more and more like we were way over our heads. We have 4 racks wired to a single 20amp circuit. Our UPS is at 90% load and we only have 10 machines on it. We have all of our cooling on one side of the server room where it is about 60 degrees, the other side of the room where the servers exhaust is about 30 degrees warmer, so it appears that we have some convection problems with only a handful of the machines on, right now. We're realizing that there is a lot more to building a datacenter than racking servers, what else have we missed?"

"On the positive note, we have a really nice overhead wire rack, that's looking good and all of our wiring is really tight looking; all the colors match, all the cables are labeled, they are all the right length, etc.

Are there any guides or how-tos on this? Since we're going to bite the bullet and tell the boss that we messed up we want to try to correctly measure the rest of the work involved in making it work. What happens when the UPS is at 100% load and how Dell servers react to being under powered?"

Comments

Hmph

[the Man in Black]

If the state of IT in this country is ay indication, your best bet is to fire everyone and outsource your needs to India.

But maybe I'm just bitter.

Department of Redundnacy Department

[adamy]

Have no single point of a failure.Multiple UPS,network connections inside and outside, routers, firewalls, switches, etc. If anythinggoes down, you need to be able to replace it as quick as possible.

Are you in an earthquake zone (The Bay ARea)? If so, make sure 1, the building is earthquake retrofit, 2) the racks are all bolted to the wals suck that a little shake up doesn't turn into a shake down.

Make sure you are getting enough power to the building. Have Generators in case power goes out. UPS should only keep things going long enough for the generators to kick in.

Off site backups, of course. It is hard to beat the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of storage. Daily backups should be moved out of the building, I'd suggest on firewire/SCSI hotswappable hard drives, but there are many ways to solve this problem. Longer term backups should be a geographically out of disater range (east coast to west coast ideally)

Did I mention redundancy? Make sure you havea duplicate of everything.

OK, you have it built? Now test it. Kill the power and see if the UPSs can hold it long enough for the generators kick in. Now do it again, but pull out one generator.

Get one of those devices that allows you to remotely power cycle your machines as well, incase it locks up.

Havea back door (IE a dial up) to get into your data center unless you are going to have it manned 24/7. THis will keep you from coming in at 2 AM when a router blows.

Thats all off the top of my head. If I am wrong, please point out where, as the alternative viewpoints will be wuite helpful.