Your Next Data Centre Build: A Guide to Overcoming Common Challenges
If you’ve ever built a data centre, then you’ll know how much meticulous planning, design and testing goes into it.
A data centre houses the critical infrastructure to keep your organisation’s systems operating smoothly. If you’re considering a new data centre build, then it’s essential to understand the complexities and common challenges that may come with this.
Let’s dive straight in.
Consider the Design of Your Data Centre
One of the key challenges that we discuss with our clients is how the design balances efficiency, scalability and useability. After all, you’ll want your data centre to last as long as possible and it has to work for you.
The solution?
Choose a partner that understands your specific business and technology challenges. Our team works collaboratively with you to design a data centre that excels in these areas.
Our designs are scalable and sustainable by design, allowing for easy expansion or reconfiguration as your data centre requirements evolve without sacrificing efficiency. We help select locations considering factors like proximity to your users and services and the availability of reliable power and connectivity.
As winners of the Schneider Electric Sustainability Impact Award:
- Sustainability is a core principle in our design philosophy.
- We prioritise energy-efficient features throughout the data centre, recognising the importance of minimising your environmental impact in today’s world.
- We source materials locally whenever possible to further reduce your carbon footprint.
By partnering with us, you can be confident that your new data centre design will be efficient, scalable, secure, and built with a focus on long-term sustainability.
Powering Your Data Centre
Ensuring that your data centre has a sufficient power supply is crucial for your organisation to manage its data and run smoothly, without any hiccups. Fluctuations or outages can lead to costly downtime and data loss and possibly equipment damage – not the ideal situation.
It’s therefore important to prioritise power quality. We implement quality, scalable 3 Phase UPS’s, and make use of Standby Generators as a back-up source of power to keep power clean and reliable.
The Uninterruptible Power Supply systems act as a safety net for your critical equipment and data. They provide automatic online backup power by utilising batteries to bridge the gap between a mains power failure and the activation of the backup generator. This seamless transition ensures minimal disruption to your operations, with millions of organisations worldwide trust UPS systems to safeguard their data centres from costly power interruptions.
But for those occasional times when extended power outages occur, a standby generator becomes the essential backup source. We partner with multiple vendors, to offer a broad range of fully scalable generator solutions. These solutions cater to diverse needs, with options for various fuel tank capacities (8-hour and 24-hour) and power ratings ranging from 5kVA to a 1.4MW and fuel options of Diesel, HVO and Natural gas.
By prioritising a robust power supply strategy, you can eliminate concerns about power interruptions and ensure your data centre operates seamlessly, 24/7.
Cooling, Considering Environmental Impact
It’s obvious, but data centres do use a significant amount of energy. As we progress to a Net Zero country by 2050, it’s important to consider how your organisation can reduce its data centre’s environmental impact as much as possible.
One way in which your data centre can reduce its environmental impact, is by implementing efficient cooling solutions. Our precision cooling solutions are custom-tailored to your specific needs. So whether you require cooling for racked or non-racked IT equipment, these efficient and modular room cooling products provide flexible rack-level temperature and humidity control, adapting to the diverse requirements of your data centre environment.
Close coupled cooling solutions deliver targeted cooling directly to low-to-high density server racks. Intelligent controls dynamically adjust fan speed and cooling capacity based on the real-time IT heat load, maximising efficiency and ensuring your cooling system remains agile within your data centre environment.
By ensuring optimal containment and rack air distribution, we can focus on managing airflow for individual rows, racks, preventing hot spots within your data centre. When incorporated into an aisle containment solution, it prevents hot air recirculation, significantly improving cooling predictability and equipment availability. In-row cooling is particularly well-suited for high-density server deployments, where cooling needs vary based on load.
For mission-critical environments, we offer a range of cooling options. Traditional mechanical, refrigerant-based condensers and water chillers are available, alongside the latest environmentally friendly free-cooling chillers. These innovative systems utilise ambient air as a free resource to chill the water, significantly reducing energy consumption throughout the year.
Other cooling systems such as Hot Aisle Containment Solutions (HACS) and Cold Aisle Containment Solutions (CACS) also particularly useful in reducing environmental impact. CACS effectively manages airflow by containing cold air and preventing it from mixing with hot exhaust air from IT equipment. This maximises cooling predictability, capacity, and overall efficiency within server rooms and data centres. HACS ensures that hot exhaust air from server racks is contained within a designated aisle, preventing it from affecting the rest of your data centre environment, essentially creating a large reservoir of cool air for optimal equipment performance.
Data Centre Copper and Fibre Networking
With poor networking and cabling, follows bottlenecks and performance / management issues. We therefore recommend planning your cabling infrastructure to include best copper implementation as well as single and multimode fibre integration to futureproof your data centre.
Physical Security Challenges
The physical security of your data centre is of the upmost importance. With an increasing amount of malicious attacks targeting data centres and cloud computing infrastructure, it’s key to examine the features you can implement to battle these threats.
Instead of implementing traditional access control methods like PIN codes and key cards, we can use advanced biometric access systems that use fingerprint scanning for authorised personnel. This layered approach protects your data centre from physical intrusion 24/7, ensuring your applications receive the necessary protection to operate optimally.
We also prioritise physical security with intelligent solutions to safeguard your data centre from break-ins, theft, and unauthorised access. This includes high-definition CCTV and video surveillance systems that can be strategically installed to cover your perimeter, entry points, and even individual server cabinets. These security solutions are linked to real-time monitoring tools, allowing you to remotely access information and receive instant alerts about activity within your data centre. This empowers you to make critical decisions and address security issues in real-time.
With our ModuSec GS: NPSA rated product, we’re also approved for UK Government use – offering a high standard of Defense and High Security Solutions, for the toughest environments.
Management of Your Data Centre
Lastly, managing your data centre environment is paramount is you’re looking to future-proof your organisation’s storage and management of data. Monitoring your critical systems efficiently is never easier with the helpful EcoStruxure IT Advisor and Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT Expert software tools.
EcoStruxure IT Advisor is a next-generation software solution that acts as a central hub for all your data centre asset information, eliminating the need for cumbersome spreadsheets and simplifying your asset management processes. It goes beyond basic monitoring by utilising advanced modeling and optimisation features to predict potential issues before they escalate into major problems.
For organisations with geographically distributed IT infrastructure or edge computing deployments, Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT Expert provides a secure, cloud-based solution that helps you to monitor your IT environment remotely. Regardless of location it offers real-time monitoring of power, cooling, and other critical infrastructure components across multiple vendors. You can proactively manage your entire IT infrastructure, including features like benchmarking, assessment, and instant fault notification.
Conclusion
As you now know, there is several challenges when it comes to a new data centre build, and the above isn’t a comprehensive list either.
So if you’re looking for a data centre partner who can be your guide through this thorough process, do get in touch to start a discussion with our team today.