raised floor, the facility will be impacted in unexpected ways. As equipment footprints shrink, free floor area is populated with more hardware. However, because the smaller equipment rejects the same amount of heat, power and cooling densities grow dramatically, and floor space for cooling equipment increases. The large footprint now required for reliable power without planned downtime – e.g., switchgear, generators, UPS modules, and batteries – also affects the planning and maintenance of data center facilities. Over the last two decades, the cost of the facility relative to the computer hardware it houses has not grown proportionately. Budget priorities that favor computer hardware over facilities improvement can lead to insufficient performance. The best way to ensure a balanced allocation of capital is to prepare a business analysis that includes costs associated with the risk of downtime. This cost depends on the consequences of an unplanned service outage in that facility and the probability that an outage will occur.
3.7 Design Considerations for the Mission Critical Data Center
In most mission critical facilities, the data center constitutes the critical load in the daily operations of a company or institution. The costs of hardware and software could run $3000‐ $4000 per square foot, often resulting in an investment of millions and millions of dollars depending on size and risk profile. In a data center of only 5000 square feet, you could be responsible for a $20 million capital investment, without even considering the cost of downtime. Combined, the cost of downtime and damage to equipment could be catastrophic.
Proper data center design and operations will protect the investment and minimize downtime. Early in the planning process, an array of experienced professionals must review all the factors that affect operations. This is no time to be “jack of all trades, master of none.” Here are basic steps critical to designing and developing a successful mission critical data center:
Basic Steps to Building a Critical Data Center
Determine the needs of the client and the reliability of the mission critical data center.
Develop the configuration for the hardware.
Calculate the air, water, and power requirements.
Determine your total space requirements and expected future space requirements.
Validate the specific site: Be sure that the site is well located and away from natural disasters and that electric, telecommunications, and water utilities can provide the high level of reliability your company requires.
Develop a layout after all parties agree.
Design the mission critical infrastructure to (N+1), (N+2), or higher redundancy level, depending on the risk profile and reliability requirements.
Once a design is agreed upon, prepare a budgetary estimate for the project, ensure a sufficient contingency is included in the budget at this point due to many unknowns and price escalations.
Have a competent consulting engineer prepare specifications and bid packages for equipment purchases and construction contracts. Use only vendors that are familiar with and experienced in the mission critical industry.
After bids are opened, select, and interview vendors and contractors. Take time to carefully choose the right vendors. Make sure you see their work; ask many questions; verify references and be sure that everybody is on the same page.
Update the project budget with proper adjustments from the received vendor and contractor bids. Contingency can be reduced now that base costs are received but not eliminated! Unforeseen construction issues, last‐minute design changes, or Owner changes will cause cost increase to occur.
3.7.1 Data Center Certification
In addition to the previously mentioned design considerations, The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification is also important to consider. LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system developed by the US Green Building Council and should not be overlooked when designing a data center. LEED Certification will look great for customers as well as the boardroom since its implementation requires energy efficiency improvements. While initial costs for LEED certification are 2‐4% higher than standard building construction, it theoretically results in an energy savings annually over the facility's lifecycle. LEED has yet to develop specific standards that apply to data centers in the accreditation process in its current version 2.2. LEED BD+C: Data Center (Building Design and Construction) has been developed and rolled out to the masses. It is aimed at remediating special data center conditions as compared to typical office building LEED requirements. In addition, LEED 2009 introduced a new method of weighting credits and systems, such as LEED Bookshelf, that will allow the creation of new credits, which is very promising for data centers’ energy challenges.
Certification involves categories such as sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy & atmosphere, materials & resources, indoor environmental quality, renewable power, innovation & design, and regional priority. A 100‐point scale with 10 bonus points is assigned to these categories, and there are four levels of certification: certified, silver, gold, and platinum. The most points can be earned in the Energy & Atmosphere category. They are given for building designs that are capable of tracking building performance, managing refrigerants in order to reduce CFCs, and renewable energy use.
Many data centers have attained LEED certifications in an effort to curb energy consumption and reduce GHG’s. One of the first data centers in the world to achieve LEED Platinum was the Citigroup Data Center in Frankfurt, Germany, in April 2009. Some features implemented to achieve certification were the use of fresh air free cooling, reverse osmosis water treatment in cooling towers to reduce water use, a vegetated roof, a vegetated green wall irrigated using harvested rainwater, extensive use of server virtualization, and a data center layout that reduces required cabling by 250 km. New data center designs should take these practices and expand on them in order to achieve LEED Certification.
Another internationally used rating system similar to LEED is the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM), which is based in the United Kingdom. As you can see from its title, BREEAM is an environmental assessment method for all types of new and existing buildings that provides best practices for sustainable design. BREEAM has a set of standard categories in which a building can be assessed under called schemes. The array of schemes they provide covers a wide range of facilities, including prisons, schools, offices, and industrial factories. There is incredible flexibility with this system because if there is a building that does not fall under standard categories, BREEAM will develop a customized criterion to evaluate the building. When trying to attain BREEAM certification, the ratings that can be attained include Pass, Good, Very Good, and Excellent.
In 2010 BREEAM has launched its new scheme called BREEAM Data Centres to evaluate the environmental performance of data centers. Data Centers are unique environments as they have limited employees but still use huge amounts of energy. In addition, the intensive energy use will only increase with rising computing needs and demands. According to BREEAM, this new framework could reduce energy use in data centers by more than 50%2. Over the next year, it is hoped that this new scheme will be refined even further to provide the design, construction, and operation of data centers with the most efficient and effective standards possible.
3.8 The Evolution of Mission Critical Facility Design
To avoid downtime, facilities managers also must understand the trends that affect the utilization of data centers,
