How Would You Design Your Dream Office?

An anonymous reader writes "My company is building a new office. As the local IT Guy, I've been asked to design my new office from the ground up. If you were given the opportunity to design your dream office, what features would you include? What things would you try to avoid? I get to determine absolutely everything. The catch? I have to share my office space with all the network equipment. Just 4 standard racks, and all your basic telephone and network wiring. Can anyone help me get started? I have no idea where to even begin."

Comments

My recommendations

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Separate your work area from the racks with a wall.
2) Soundproof & insulate that wall or your office will be noisy & 65 degrees F year round.
3) Make sure there's extra room in the server side of it, or your office will get taken over.
4) Your desk should face the door. Otherwise, people will always walk up behind you.
5) Get a filing cabinet, some drawers and some shelves to keep your stuff in. Whenever you get paperwork, file it if it would be troublesome to get another copy or you'll refer to it often, recycle it otherwise.

Re:My recommendations

[jdray]

Agreed. If your company is large enough to have four racks full of equipment, it's large enough to have a (small) datacenter. The cooling requirements for that much gear are non-trivial, and trying to balance the cooling and the heat output so that the air temp is comfortable for you would be an exercise in futility.

A small room, 12' by 12', is about what it takes to house four racks. Okay, you could go with 10' x 12' if you only make space on one end to get around the racks, but 12x12 will give you a little growth room (one rack worth). You need space behind the racks as well as in front.

Separate exterior doors to the datacenter is a good idea if you expect the IT department to grow beyond about five people, but for a small shop, having access to the datacenter via your office not only provides a level of security (your office becomes a sort of DMZ), but tends to insure that your office will always be the office of "the IT guy," since no manager wants to have people traipsing through his office all the time to "fool with the computers."

To further your insurance, do a nice custom wiring job in your office space so that you have extra network ports (including some out-of-band ports for monitoring), power outlets that are on the same UPS system as the data center, and a few special ports like serial lines to the console ports of your network and telephone switches. Furthermore, put in a wall-mount PC rack high up on one wall (complete with network port and power outlet) and tie it to a large LCD screen for at-a-glance system monitoring. Don't make the screen too large, as it will be seen as garish. I wouldn't go over 37".

As others suggested, your desk should face the door. In the "public" space between your desk and the door wall should be a small table with two or three chairs for closed-door meetings. Store stacks of paperwork on the table, giving the visual cue that work is always going on in your office. The rest of the office should be clean and well kept. You're the head of IT, everything should be digital, except for your nod to interaction with "the rest of the world" via the papers on the meeting table.

Leave space on the walls for a little art of your choosing. I recommend landscapes or florals, as they tend away from hard lines. It gives you something to look at that's not rigid in nature, and can be very relaxing. Furthermore, it gives the impression to visitors that you're deeper in personality than "just a computer geek." Also, have several plants around the office. They help freshen the air and further take away the stark stigma. Get someone else in the office into a routine of helping you maintain the plants so you can occasionally take a vacation without them dying. If your office has a plant service, so much the better.

The door to your office should have a card-key lock on it, as should the door between your office and the datacenter. Be sure that the access lists for both locks are separate. You want to be sure that you can filter the access for both spaces differently (the whole "DMZ" thing again).

Good luck. I hope it works out for you. I suspect it won't. You should do a Slashback and let us all know how things turn out.

Re:Office space?

[ttapper04]

The square footage of your office is most important. The bigger your office in relation to those around you the more important you are, and thus the more "dreamy" your office is.

Cover up empty wall space with your favorite artwork.

If you are lucky enough to have a window, then orient your desk so you can look out.

Proper lighting is key. My 20x16 office has 4 florescent fixtures each with 4 bulbs, and when a few go out you can tell a big difference.

Re:Avoid wireless

[Quadraginta]

Humans have not evolved to deal with radiation at these frequencies.

Dude...are you aware of how much energy the Sun puts out in the radio spectrum? Or lightning storms? Get a wideband receiver and tune it to 1 GHz or so, near the wireless frequencies, and turn down the squelch. All that static noise you hear is natural radiation on radio frequencies. Been around since God was in diapers.

And while we're on the subject, you might google around for any successful example of radiofrequency EM radiation being used to cause a chemical reaction (which is the only way it could damage your precious bodily fluids). You won't find any. The photon energy in the RF spectrum is absurdly small compared to typical chemical bond energies. Heck, it's way less than the photon energy of infrared radiation, which of course your own body emits in copious quantities.

Your comment reminds me of a James Thurber story, in which his grandmother (who grew up in the 19th century) insisted that all the electrical outlets in her house be stopped up, because she was sure invisible electricity was leaking out of them, spreading out across the floor, and could be causing all kinds of mischief. After all, human beings did not evolve around electricity...

Partition into office, foyer, server room

[Khopesh]

You want two or three partitions in this room. Refer to the server area as the "server room" and your desk area as your "office." If there's a large enough entry/path area, call that either the "entryway" or the "foyer" ... this establishes the room as a suite and helps distinguish between your space and the IT department's space (even if the dept. is currently just you). Put a nameplate or whatever on the outside of the door (or next to it) that says "IT Suite" or thereabouts (you can even put the subdivisions under it, with your name and "Server Room" getting separate entries).

Give yourself a corner desk, either an L-shape or a U-shape. You want to face the door, so this means one side of the desk follows the wall and another side sticks out into the room so that you have to walk around three sides of it to sit at your chair (this partitions the foyer and the office). Put a big shelving unit in the foyer so that people can come in and grab things without disturbing you (or falling out of your peripheral vision).

The "server room" portion should be well partitioned (hopefully with a floor-to-ceiling wall), specifically for insulation against noise and climate control (make sure those rack fans are pointed away from your desk!). It should also have an operating table, specifically always clear so that if something breaks you have space to work on it. The best way to ensure it is always clear is to have it as an island (against no wall); all walls should have shelves or racks so that the table never gets pushed against a wall. The server room portion should either have a raised floor or a ceiling with easy-access drop-down power conduits and network lines (this solves the issues of an island table, and makes for a much easier environment to maintain). The trash can should be near the door (or outside it) so that the janitor doesn't mess anything up, and the room should lock with a different key than the one to your office (the janitor shouldn't have access to it). You move the trash outside the server room when you go home (if it's full) and move it back into the server room as needed.

Put at least one waist-high shelf right by the door to the server room for cups and food, and leave an empty cup there to help remind people (including yourself) to keep food out of the server "room."

Re:Raised floors don't work here

[rcw-work]

That's exactly what I meant by ladder racking (or cable runways, or whatever the kids are calling it these days). Yes, the part that you can see looks better with a raised floor, but it sucks so much to run cable under a floor that that's all anyone ever does - no one ever organizes or cleans under there. Sure, they'll take a wet/dry vac to it after an A/C accident, but they won't go back under if they remember they forgot a can of soda pop down there. It'll sit there until the fruit flies eat it all up.

My favorite thing for patch panels/switches is to put them on separate horizontally adjacent racks. A cable goes up from the patch panel to the cable management bracket, over to a gap between the racks, forms a U where all of the slack is stored, then goes into cable management again and then down to its switch port. It looks good with all of the slack in one place, it's easy to make changes, and you don't have cables running directly across the front of equipment (making it impossible to remove, or in some cases, inspect).

And if you do wall-mount the switches and patch panels, use a hinged rack (example) so you can get to the back of it. And of course, tell your cabler which side should be hinged so they'll be forced to use two extra brain cells to run the cable so it can be hinged.

Re:First investment

[TClevenger]

Absolutely. I'd take a cube over a desk in a server room any day.

They may have to...

[msauve]

(go even further.)

OSHA has something to say about the matter.

Re:First investment

[upside]

I bought an old Cisco 2900XL for home use/playing around but had to relegate it to testing only because of the fan noise. At work the new models are just about the same.

A Cisco router creates 43-57 dBA, equivalent to a TV set blaring constantly one meter away. Four full height racks implies quite a few boxes, too. Not a good working environment.