Ask Slashdot: What Would You Include In a New Building?

First time accepted submitter weiserfireman writes "For the first time in our company's 60 year history, we are going to be building a new facility from scratch. We are a CNC Machine shop with 40 employees and 20 CNC machines, crammed into a 12,000 sq foot building. We are going to build a new 30,000 sq foot building. I am the only IT person. I support all the computer systems, as well as all the fire/security/phone systems. My Boss has asked for my input on what infrastructure to include in the new building to support current and future technology. 1st on my list is a telecommunications equipment room. Our current building doesn't have one. I have been researching this topic on the Internet, and I have a list of a lot of different things, all of them are nice, but I know I am going to have a limited budget. If you were in my shoes, what priorities what features would you design into the building?"

Comments

Conduit

[toygeek]

Perhaps this is obvious, but its the very first thing that popped into my head. You might not need to install a lot of cabling to run what you have, relatively speaking, but you WILL need to install more later and you WILL wish you had installed bigger conduit. So, plan your current needs as being 1/3 to 1/2 capacity and leave plenty of room for more. It doesn't cost much more to install bigger/more conduit now, but it will cost TONS more to install it later. Your successors will praise you.

Re:Conduit

[zentigger]

and make sure you leave an extra pull string inside each run!

Re:Conduit

[Sarten-X]

Preferably with a nice little tag (on the conduit itself, or at least on the string) that says where it goes.

While you (or your successors) can run around the building waving a cable tracer around like a dousing rod, labels make for a lot fewer weird looks.

Re:Conduit

[jonadab]

Yeah, conduit is the first thing I was going to say too.

I mean, if you'd built the thing in 1990, you could have put in cat3 phone cable and A/V coax, and three years later you'd have been wanting network cable. If you'd built in 1994 and put in twenex cable, three years later you'd have wanted cat5. If you'd built in 1998 and put in cat5, three years later you'd have been wondering about cat5e. Maybe in a couple of years you'll want fiber optic cables. Then again, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll want KVM cables, or a new kind of audio/video cable, or USB5, or eSATA4, or WestBridge ExternalBUS cable, or IEEE 1394k, or whatever kind of cable your new SAN uses, or QuantumLine entanglement cable, or liquid-argon lines for the new cooling system, or some other wonderful new thing they come out with six weeks after your drywall is put in. Who knows? Hooray for progress.

If you put in plenty of good conduit, you can run whatever kind of cable you need, without ripping up the walls or, even less fun than that, messing around with a half-stiff plumber's tape trying to figure out whether there's another hole through the next wall stud somewhere.

Ideally, the conduit should be in relatively straight, relatively short runs leading from one easily-accessed junction box to another, each of which in turn connects to others. The *main* junction boxes should be connected to one another via 2-3 runs (each) of extra-large conduit, and then from those main boxes you can have branch conduits running out to the peripheral ones.

And yeah, leaving a pull line in each segment of conduit is always good.

Good duct work is also nice, and put in about twice as many bathrooms as you think you need, because it's a real pain to add more later. Storage space is also good.

Cooling

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're building in an ice cap, you'll need a reliable and likely fairly powerful cooling system for your telecom/server room. You should have it spec'd into the building's system capacity with the proper ductwork installed up front. Retrofitting that sort of thing can be a pain down the road.

Re:Cooling

[silas_moeckel]

Please for the love of do not have it be part of the building AC especially in a machine shop. You have solvents, grease, lubricant, metal bits etc in that shop air. Building AC is not designed to run in winter (assuming you don't live where AC is required year round). The split systems are an easy install and only run a few k at the low end. Do make sure there is nothing going through the roof or carrying liquids above the room. Do try and get it on an exterior wall and have backup fans installed though the wall a couple hundred bucks of fan can cool the room well enough when the AC is broken. Depending on the type of machines you expect long term fiber is always a good thing immune to EMI from plasma cutters and the like. Good door locks that log per person to the security system is a good idea same with camera's.

A decent canteen and staff facilities

[Viol8]

There's nothing worse than being in a building where money was no object - for the machinary, but to hell with the staff. So at lunchtime you have to wander down to some dodgy joint to get some garbage for lunch because there's nothing else around and coffee comes curtesy of Mr Vend. Thanks, but I don't care how 733t the equipment is, I don't want to work somewhere like that again.

Re:Enough copper in the walls...

[Anonymous Coward]

Run away from "The Wireless Future" as fast as you can. Pull cable to everything that isn't moving and has an ethernet port

Not IT related, but ...

[PPH]

... locker rooms and showers. Probably already considered in a manufacturing facility. But you'd be surprised to see how this detail is missed in a white collar setting when employees start riding bicycles to work.

Showers.

[rthille]

So that employees can cycle or run/walk to work, or at lunch and not stink up the place. Fit employees are cheaper on the health-care front and happier.

Closets

[hymie!]

Somebody's going to mod me down, but I'm dead serious. This is the second time a company I worked for has moved to a new location with no storage space for anything at all -- HR documents, financial documents, machinery (both active and surplus), office supplies, even employee's coats. Let me assure you how professional it looks to have random file cabinets placed all over what are supposed to be ADA-compliant-width hallways. </sarc>

Re:Enough copper in the walls...

[houstonbofh]

What he said. I do wireless for a living, and I am a big fan of cable.

Re:Suggestions

[burnt_cajun_toast]

Since you're the only (IT) person, it might be a very good idea allocate budget $ and hire a firm that has the experience designing facilities. Aside from the fact you might miss a very important feature, you really should have the input from professionals that have experience along with the electrical/fire/security since it does not seem to be your expertise. The money spent at the design phase just might save you that much more down the line, especially since a small error could have major consequences. Just my $.02

Re:Optical fiber link to every desk

[AK Marc]

Oh, and one thing I'd add to an otherwise great post.

Draw a map/diagram and give copies to everyone who might ever need it. Keep it updated with any adds/moves/changes. There's no point to a great labeling scheme if nobody knows what it means when you, the *only* IT guy, leaves.