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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?"
Unless you are in a wildly electrically hostile environment
He's in a machine shop. Only thing worse is a arc welding plant. Do yourself a favor and run fiber to every machine, not every desktop. In ye olden days at the plant I had to run that new-fangled cat-5 thru roof trusses spaced many feet between power conduits just to keep interference down. We didn't even bother trying to set up a networked PC in the welding area. All that plant cat-5 was replaced with fiber as budget permitted. Assuming you terminate your own SC/ST (or whatever) connectors, the main cost is a couple hundred bucks for the ethernet to fiber converters.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I will offer this caveat: If you are interviewing for a junior position at a law firm and they advertise an on site health club for their employees, run like hell. It means they'll be expecting you to work (very) long hours and keep a few changes of clothes on site.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes, because the building design is going to have an impact on what you want. In an office w/ drop ceilings (common), you really don't want to waste time with conduit, in most cases getting a server room near the outside for direct venting means giving up window offices, so thats would be a tough call. In some cases raised floors make great sense, in others they are a waste. What about security? Is it a shared space? multi-floor? Whats the likely tech growth (is a need for > 1 Gbps realistic for business needs or could you save 20% with plain Cat 5 cables?) What about phones? A good VOIP system might save half the cable drops. What is the REAL business cost of downtime? Do you need backup generators, or could you put the critical into the cloud? what kind of internet access do you need?
There are so many questions that you need real answers to, cost benefit analysis, and a real understanding of impacts (Don't ask for things that are cool or will make your life easier, know how it will save money now (seriously, spending $100 now to maybe save $500 later is rarely a good investment), by allowing faster recovery, more reliable operations, lower headcount, better security, etc