IT‑IS‑Networking
Technology › Physical Infrastructure

Data Center Facility Design

The power and cooling underneath the architecture — floor plans, rack elevations, containment, dual UPS and independent A/B electrical paths.

Also known as DCIM, Hot/Cold Aisle Containment, A/B Power

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 12 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Designed the data center facilities themselves, not only what ran inside them, including the disaster recovery site: floor plan and rack elevations, hot and cold aisle containment, dual UPS with battery plant and maintenance bypass, independent A and B electrical paths from separate panels and transformers, and overhead busway power distribution.

An architecture is only as available as the power and cooling underneath it, and the failure I have seen most often is a resilient logical design sitting on a single power path nobody drew.

Then instrumented what had been designed: data center infrastructure management monitoring the full power chain, UPS output across both feeds and generator power, underfloor water detection, humidity, and hot and cold aisle temperatures to confirm the containment was performing the way it was drawn. Designing the facility and then instrumenting it closes the loop — you find out whether the drawing was right.