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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."
The best pair of noise canceling headphones you can find. 4 racks of equipment in your office? I'd go bonkers in about a day.
Seriously, we have no idea what kind of room we have to work with, how many people you need space for, etc.
I'd make my dream office with blackjack... and hookers! In fact, forget the office...
That's not an office. That's a "stick the IT guy in the closet so we don't have to spend money on him" room.
I would make my door lock a random game of killer sudoko, thus ensuring that management never troubled me - but was too embarrassed about looking mentally deficient to complain.
Beep beep.
What's wrong with this picture?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
@home
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
And where are you going to put the ramp to wheel equipment up the extra 2 feet? Unless this is the basement and you can excavate and pour another slab, raised floors either need a lot of room to get into and out of, or they need their own floor (as in, "this entire first floor of this building is for the raised floor"). You won't have much luck convincing an architect to cut a 10x20' hole in a post-tensioned slab.
Just put the rack cabinets where you want them (3.5' of clearance in front, 2' to at least one side and the rear) and the plywood/OSB wall-o-punchdown-blocks where you want them, and install ladder racking between them so that all of the cables are organized and out of the way. Also, delivering each power circuit through conduit to receptacle boxes at the top of each rack cabinet is a really clean way of doing it - it prevents anyone from tripping over any power cords.
I suspect that a large percentage of raised-floor proponents haven't spent much time underneath one.
Exactly you can't work in the same room as servers and network equipment an IT Department in an office needs ideally three areas.
1. Server room. So cold that you need to add two layers of clothing when you go in. It should have tiled and raised floors and separate AC power circuit.
2. Secure storage area, your server room is not a dumping ground for unused hardware, boxes of wires, software and whatever else that has a plug.
3. Work area, in addition to a desk with triple screen linked to a kvm for your desktop and laptop you need a work surface on which you can do hardware repair and configuration.
First of all, consider the safety aspects. If you're going to be the only human being in there, either by design or because any other team members will be absent for any length of time, what will you do if there's a fire in one of the racks, or an electrical accident?
Just installing fire-supression is more cure than prevention and it doesn't stop you getting injured if the fire is between you and the exit.
If you're surrounded by electrical equipment, I would hope you company would enforce a ban on liquids (coffee etc.) in the room. If they don't do this from the outset, they will as soon asn health and safety get sight of theplan - or someone spills a drink over the equipment. How will you deal with that?
Finally, expect that over time, more and more equipment will get moved into the room and it will encroach on your "office" space. Where will you personally draw the line? When it becomes a general store room? When the cleaner starts leaving their buckets on your desk?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Ideally, you'd have a ton of cash, plenty of time and space, and clear constraints from your management about growth and uptime. Of course, if any business operated like that, they'd be bankrupt already, so you'll probably get a small stipend for construction and move-in, no idea how many people you'll have to support, and a tiny little chunk in the middle of the building for your new digs.
Once you get what info you can, I'd suggest creating a list of priorities addressing the following issues:
Once you have the server portion of your office set up, I'd look for ways to make yourself comfortable. This is where it gets way more personal, but consider how many people will be on your staff, how much equipment you'll need, a workbench, network monitoring display (and sound system for switching over to movie mode), and always remember to FACE THE DOOR with your monitor in front of you... it's good feng shui, and your boss won't see when you're playing poker online.
Good luck, and have fun!
Cheers!
Better, make sure there is no line of sight from the door to your desk. That way no-one can see if you're sitting behind it without coming into the room.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Don't forget to check out OSHA rules (assuming you're in the US - if not, s/OSHA/your local occupational health authority/) regarding noise levels. Depending on how much crap you have, it may make cross the limit for an unprotected workplace environment - which will either lead to you getting an office in another room (good outcome), or you getting your ass fired (bad outcome).
Cue The Sun...
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...
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."
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
...is another man's IT Kingdom.
Firstly, with that huge amount of rack equipment, you'll need to either separate yourself from it with a wall, or you'll freeze from the constant A/C that is required and go nuts from the noise as previously stated.
For the more mundane details:
- Cable Management. Try to build the room with cable management in mind. Where do the cables go? I wouldn't mention this if you hadn't mentioned the racks. It sounds like you're building a server room that you're going to put your primary machine in. That's great and all, but that's also still "The Server Room" and not "An Office" with carpet and quiet.
- Power sources. Off the ground, preferably over your head.
- Different colored cabling. The more precise you can get this, the easier it is to find/test/figure out problems. "The web servers are on the green cabling and the file server on red" is one of the most appreciated phrases ever when things go wrong.
- Room to grow. You've grown this much so far. In five years you're going to have more machines in there. Can you handle it and still have "your side"?
- Has your management taken into account the noise factor?
- Monitor arm. Now you can install one of these! I heard these were sweet and I think it'd be really cool (dream, right?)
- Fire protection system. Being in the vicinity of those servers will probably put you very close to their fire protection. Have you thought about what systems you want to keep them safe?
- What about Water protection, if that's a consideration?
- RJ11 and RJ45 jacks. Put jacks everywhere, even if they're not being used. You can never have too many jacks or wires run.
- Filing cabinets, shelving, etc. Just wanted to mention that.
- Build a floor plan in a flowcharting program. Map out EVERYTHING. Where you want everything to go and everything to face. (Face the door as someone said earlier). There are plenty of neato Web 2.0 flowcharting programs, or just download a demo copy of Visio or something (if you have a mac, use OmniGraffle -- and for that matter, use it every day for all sorts of things, that program rules!)
- Media storage cabinet. You may want to look into something like this if you're keeping track of server backups, etc.
That's all I can think of at the moment.
(go even further.)
OSHA has something to say about the matter.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
1) Hot secretary sitting outside
2) Giant, twin mahogany doors
3) Giant windows overlooking the Boston Harbor or some other body of water
4) Balcony overlooking said body of water
5) At least 30 stories from the ground
6) Big desk
7) Comfortable leather chair
8) Hot secretary
9) Not-so-mini mini bar
10) Mini golf game
11) Phone with speaker-phone and an accessible mute button
12) HiFi stereo
13) Nice big-screen television
14) Only computer-related equipment is a laptop (no printer, this is why I have a hot secretary)
15) Hot secretary
Sliding glass door. Seriously. Good ones will block almost all of the sound, and management will still see it as one room, not two. As little as you really need to, you can still keep an eye on the equipment. I've seen this done once to great effect.
This also will keep you from freezing to death because of the AC.
(And do make sure it has good AC. Those servers will thank you.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Your comments
1) You want a serve room to hold 4 racks.
2) You want to place your 'office' alongside the server room
Assumptions
3) a Rack occupies a space 1m wide x 1m deep x 2m tall (some racks are 800mm x 800mm - it depends on the rack).
4) a rack needs a floor void below it and should have a gap between itself and the ceiling tiles of 0.5m)
Comments
a) You need to allow for expansion so commit for 1 extra rack in your plan.
this take the floor space to a minimum of 1m x 5m.
b) You should allow a 1 m walkway on all four sides!
firstly you want to get into all the front/back of a cabinet plus both ends.
so this takes the minimum to a 3m x 7m space.
if a fire breaks out half way along your exit route on one side you want an escape route the other way round.
c) You need space at one end for
- air conditioning unit
- floor standing UPS and Batteries (don't forget the battery package is going to be potentially large).
- a master power switch and a breaker switch.
each of the 30A twist-lock sockets needs a separate breaker.
depending on your power requirements you should allow for at two twist-lock ( IEC_60309 or similar) sockets per cab.
I would suggest a bay no less than 4m wide by 2m deep at one end of the room.
d) floor height & entryway
- access
most office space has a quite low raised flooring void. This is sufficient for normal power/data wiring.
however for comms rooms its a good idea to DOUBLE this void height.
Allow space for the LARGEST item to go through your doors. That may mean a FULL HEIGHT doorway,
the door may be a double or single+flap wide.
allow a RAMP not a step from your normal floorspace into the comms room.
- raised flooring suspension
allow for extra 'pillars' in the comms room to cope with the weight, especially for the UPS and COOLING.
- data cabling routes
allow for two routes IN/OUT of the room and establish a primary and secondary route. make that the fibre
loops go in one route and out the other. Allow for slack length on all cables.
- comms room security.
establish a WHO NEEDS to access this room list.
Security, Health & Safety / Fire Wardens, Compliance, IT
mandate an exclusion for everyone but IT when unaccompanied. Get the backing of the Directors & HR to control it.
use a security system to exclude unauthorised access and restrict dissemination of the ID codes.
e) Montitoring
consider an environmental monitor (APC have a range of 'wallbots / rackbot' equipment).
add a monitor to your COOLING and UPS to alert you of major failures.
f) Fire suppression
options are
GAS - expensive and takes up extra space. requires a sealed environment and separate maintenance.
WATER - from the normal sprinkler systems. wrecks your equipement.
if you're going the water route then ensure your sprinkler heads have CAGES of heavy mesh put around
each head and secured to the ceiling tiles. Then when you hit one with a ladder you don't have a wet-room.
g) Lighting.
make sure the lighting guys put the lights over the walk-routes and not over the cabinets.
yes I've seen this done.
h) Power requirements
feed a manufacturer with your equipment list and get them to run up the quote.
make sure you give them an autonomy time that is realistic.
does your new site have a backup power (deisel generator ?) that cuts
--- This meme is memory intensive
Grab a book on Feng Shui. This is not a joke. While I don't actually mean Feng Shui exactly, what I mean is get a grasp of the concept of 'organically' arranging your workplace. For the lack of a better term and concept, Feng Shui is a good place to look to get an idea of what good interior architecture is all about.
/. makes me sick)
I'll continue the list with some random stuff that comes to mind, some of which others here have mentioned allready:
1.) Wallcolors, Plaster-Textureing. There are countless possibilities here - check them out. Be sure to check out the options for organic interior building materials aswell. Consider coloring or plastering different sections of the walls with different styles.
2.) I like Zen-Style. Blends well with a high-tech enviroment too. A sleek simple real-wood desk and side-table may be all it needs to pimp your enviroment just enough. Don't save in the wrong place, plan your setup and you might find that two neat pieces blend well with that glass-enclosure rack-shelf and leave you room to breathe and think.
3.) Make the rack nice to look at and quiet. Read: Multi-Layer glass all around. Tell your boss it needs a custom enclosure if you must. Consider giving the glass-enclosure-rack a prominent position in the room where you can reach the backdoor super easy without having to move it. A well-positioned fixed installation can be a neat interior feature. (check feng-shui on this if you're out of ideas - try out the looks in a 3D programm if the need be
4.) Plan your decoration. Crappy, tacky generic office-type decoration sucks. You'll know that once you've hand-picked one or two posters of pictures for your office and leave it at that. Plan the position of them and plan your lighting accordingly. Do all your pinwall type stuff on your computer. You're a geek, take advantage of that. You can completely void reality of all ugly work-related stuff and still get work done. (Just thinking of the shitty cube decorations posted at regular intervals here on
5.) Visit a few offices of the creative guys and girls. Better-running web agencies have a fable for stylish and hip work enviroments. They have the ideas aswell. Ripp off whereever you can and don't be ashamed of it. After all, they use OSS on their webservers, don't they? Sumo beanbags, Stokke Balans (arm)chairs, hand-rafted realwood shelves on oversized industrial-style rollers (built one myself - super-easy to move around), selected wallsections with crazy-ass grafity besides intentionally blank walls. You get the picture. There are countless websites with picture of cool offices around the globe. Do some research.
6.) You a Developer? Software Team Lead? Blackboard! And I mean an old-school (literally!) real-wood big ass black (literally!) board. If you can't find one, plan it's size and position, bolt a board to the wall and paint it with black-board paint. This little german software shop did it right - surf around their site a little and check out their pictures --> http://freiheit.com/ . I'd actually like to work there just judging by the fotos.
7.) Ikke-Bana. (Ancient Japanese Art of Flower Arrangement) Check it out. Again: This is no joke.
8.) Parquet. *Real* parquet. And nothing else. Industrial parquet actually can easyly be cheaper than industrial wall-to-wall carpeting. Bug your Boss about it if it's not company policy. Maybe encourage your boss to join in on a little office-pimping spree. With the right tone of voice and mood you can get your entire departement to consider office interiors a little more.
9.) High Desk/Standing Desk. Somebody mentioned this allready. Really neat idea. We sit *all* day and that is *bad*. Space to run a few circles and a place to stand and work at is a very neat thing if you have the space to spare. Spec your PC casing to fit a standing desk if the need be - or add a second screen to your setup. You can get desks that have motors in them to lift them to standing height. N
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca