Art Carapola - The Data Center Builder’s Bible - Book 1: Defining Your Data Center Requirements: Specifying, Designing, Building and Migrating to New Data Centers

Whats this book is about?

Every year more and more infrastructure teams are finding themselves needing to build a new Data Center and migrate their environment. The challenge is that building and migrating a Data Center to a new location requires a very special set of skills that are almost never available in a typical IT department. These skills include understanding how to define your requirements, site selection skills, specialized project management skills, and incredibly broad knowledge across technologies.

Selection of the correct site is hugely important and will impact the performance and cost of the Data Center function for the life of your firms presence at that location. It costs a boatload of money to build a new Data Center environment and move into it, so a wrong decision is VERY expensive. The migration process is fraught with landmines that can derail the effort or increase the cost of the relocation. This book will help you understand the process and pitfalls and how to plan around them.

This book is part of a five-book series called The Data Center Builders Bible. The series will take you from the first moment you learn (or decide) that a new Data Center project is necessary, all the way through the completion of relocating all the necessary technology and applications to the new site and returning your old site to the landlord.

The five books that constitute this series are:

Book 1 - Defining Your Data Center Requirements

Book 2 - Site Identification and Selection

Book 3 - Designing the New Data Center

Book 4 - Building and Relocating to The New Data Center

Book 5 - Managing the New Data Center Project

Creating this series of books has been a huge undertaking. I originally planned to make this a single book. However, the extent of what the book covers, the size of the book itself (which was approaching 500 full-size pages), and the inability to publish such a large book on a Kindle required that I break it into parts.

You will not find such an extensive treatment of the design/build/relocate process anywhere. Over the years I have built and relocated many Data Centers successfully actually with zero failures. This book represents the sum of my experiences, my processes and collateral materials. What a deal!!!

Why would you be reviewing your Data Center Strategy?

Your company may have a long-term IT strategy that includes a Data Center component, or you may be responding to a more situational event, like a change in your companys business environment. Here are some of the reasons we find are the most common drivers for a new data center location:

Lease Expiration the lease on the current disaster recovery data center will expire, and you need to decide to renew the lease or relocate the data center.

Cost Reduction The cost of colocation at your current site is excessive for Data Center use. The cost of Electricity might be excessive and not related to actual usage. Alternately, the ongoing costs for communications support (such as cross-connects) are high and represent an outdated costing model. Costs are escalating at this location

Metro Risks The major risks to the data center of a city, like an NY City location, include infrastructure risks (power loss), environmental (hurricane Sandy), disasters (crane collapse) and terrorism, to name a few. If your Data Center location is so close or actually in a metro location, such as midtown Manhattan, it is subject to catastrophic-loss due to the Metro Risks

Ensure High-Availability The business grows more dependent on the IT infrastructure every year. This growth and associated dependency drive the need for 24x7x365 availability, which is hampered by exposures in your current site.

Improve Technical Alignment between Primary Site and Disaster Recovery Sites You find that current location of the DR data center is has limited space and relatively outdated technology. Addressing this in the current site will be expensive and result in fragmented space or periods of unavailability.

Need to Optimize Distance Between the Primary and Disaster Recovery Sites I have found, in many situations, that the geographic distance between the primary Data Center and the Disaster Recovery Data Center is insufficient to provide the Risk mitigation that is necessary to provide the required availability. Your project may be designed to address this issue.

What you will learn from this book series

I have divided this book into several major sections that align with the phases of the Data Center relocation effort.

Data Center Basics (Part of Book 1) For the Newbies looking at this book well spend some time at the very start talking about what a Data Center is, and the different types of Data Centers you will come across. Also, well explore how your deployment will differ if the new site is a primary production site or a disaster recovery failover site.

Defining the Requirements (Book 1) Before you can even start selecting a site for a new Data Center, you need to have clarity about the requirements for your new site. Data Center operators have specific ways of defining their facility and services, and you need to map your requirements into the same measures as the Data Center industry uses to design their proposals. In this book, you will learn what the measures are and how to present them to the potential vendors. We will cover how to define the amount and types of space you will require, how much power, how you want it delivered and how you want the Data Center Operator to bill you for your power consumption. We will talk through site locations, security requirements, availability and efficiency goals and the need for clarity regarding network provisioning.

Site Selection (Book 2) This is one of the most critical phases of the effort and determines if you expect to achieve the goals of the project. There are so many factors to consider, such as the site location, risks, carrier availability, network latencies, site redundancies, site security, critical infrastructure, services availability, and costs.

Such factors as how a Data Center vendor bills for electricity can have a huge impact on operational costs even when the cost per kilowatt hour is the same between two sites. This book examines the site selection process in incredible detail, showing the reader what factors are most important and defining the methodology needed to make the best selection. Also, this book will review the various tools and resources that are available to examine such items as carrier network maps, flood risk, and risk of a nuclear event disrupting availability. This section will also present spreadsheets that allow you to compare the various key site selection criteria among sites and determine which site will meet your goals at the best cost.

Provisioning Communications to your new site (Book 2 &3) The external network sometimes defines the selection of a site. Whether or not that is true, the carriers that are available in a Data Center will impact your decision, the timing of the relocation and the ongoing costs. Additionally, factors ranging from how communications circuits enter the Data Center building to how the carriers route their circuits between termination points will impact the circuit availability and cost. This book will examine the factors to consider, the tools that are available, and how you must time the ordering and delivery of circuits to optimize the project schedule and cost.