Data Center Handbook

Preface

Designing and operating a sustainable data center (DC) requires technical knowledge and skills from strategic planning, complex technologies, available best practices, optimum operating efficiency, disaster recovery, and more.

Engineers and managers all face challenges operating across functionalities, for example, facilities, IT, engineering, and business departments. For a mission-critical, sustainable DC project, we must consider the following:

• What are the goals?
• What are the givens?
• What are the constraints?
• What are the unknowns?
• Which are the feasible solutions?
• How is the solution validated?
• How does one apply technical and business knowledge to develop an optimum solution plan that considers emerging technologies, availability, scalability, sustainability, agility, resilience, best practices, and rapid time to value?

The list can go on and on. Our challenges may be as follows:

• To prepare a strategic location plan
• To design and build a mission critical DC with energy efficient infrastructure
• To apply best practices thus consuming less energy
• To apply IT technologies such as cloud and virtualization and
• To manage DC operations thus reducing costs and carbon footprint

A good understanding of DC components, IT technologies, and DC operations will enable one to plan, design, and implement mission-critical DC projects successfully.

The goal of this handbook is to provide DC practitioners with essential knowledge needed to implement DC design and construction, ...