When designing any room you need to put in a lot of forethought and planning, this is even more so the case for a data centre. After all, this is a room that is going to impact the effectiveness of your business. Design it right and you’re laughing. Design it wrong and you are going to have a headache for many years to come.

Let’s not pretend that designing a room to meet the demands of the modern technological day is easy. This would be the first big mistake. But don’t shy away from the challenge either. At present many businesses are looking for new data centres, reorganising their own, and even demolishing their current one and starting again. This is because business is so technologically intensive at present and the demands have changed. Your data centre will need to meet these.

When constructing any building or room you always need to lay the foundations. Determine your needs. Identify your budget. Mark out your resources. Evaluate your design specifications. Essentially, gather all of the information you can in order to have a thorough understanding of where you are at, what you have got, and where you need to be. This is all still slightly vague; it’s the next process whereby you fill in all of the gaps.

You will then start to deal with each area of design specifically. You need to decide what type of cooling system you are going to use for example. Are you going to use air conditioning or cold aisle containment? What one will be better for the design of your data centre? What is the cheapest? What is going to be the easiest to install? Don’t leave any stone unturned. Every single element of your data centre should be considered with a great level of care and thought.

There are several key tips that can help you along the way. The first and most important one is that you should always leave room for growth and flexibility. Circumstances change, the industry changes, your business changes. You need to give yourself room to manoeuvre. Every business wants to grow and get bigger – make sure your data centre offers room for expansion.

Furthermore, map out your requirements at your business to the very last server. Consider how your servers are going to be stored, how they are going to function, and so on and so forth – carry out a need analysis. You will want to think about the placement of your data cabinets in relation to the power sources as well.

And finally, never lose sight of your goal. If you don’t have a vision for what your data centre is going to be like in the end then you are asking for trouble. You always need to visualise where you are going to be in order for you to get there.

You also need to think about your working area too; not only where your tech is housed. More and more companies are opting for the modular office desk system today, as they deem it more productive. How will this fit in with your employees’ access to the tech they need?

Hopefully this article will have given you some basic tips for the design of your data centre. And remember, if you are not confident of designing the data centre yourself then there are professionals on hand who can work with you in order to help you achieve your goals.