Digital Realty Trust shares insight into the four dynamic forces that exist in every data center.

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Balancing the Special Forces: A Practical Example
Achieving a balance between the four “special forces” begins with determining the customer’s level of risk adversity and then identifying the most cost efficient solution to be incorporated into its data center. The sum of this process is typically based on the customer’s answers to five essential questions:

• What risk am I concerned with and what is its likelihood?
• How can I design my facility to mitigate these risks?
• How can facility operations mitigate that risk?
• What are the capital and operating costs of the various approaches?
• Which investment is the business prepared to make to mitigate that risk?

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The need for data center space is booming. Due to the convergence of a diversity of factors including: synchronous applications growth, rising regulatory requirements, and enhanced storage demands, a high percentage of existing data centers can expand no further. The Gartner Group estimates that over 50% of existing data centers will be obsolete within the next five years. In order to ensure that your search for data center space ends with a facility that can support both your current and future requirements it is important to accurately determine your space and power requirements. All this seems like a simple endeavor, however if you are not correctly expressing your requirements you may wind up with a data center whose obsolescence begins shortly after your move-in date.

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The first, and perhaps most important, step in developing your new data center is quantifying your space and power requirements correctly. Only by viewing your needs in terms of kW of IT load can you be assured of accurately determining your requirements. By using this measure you factor in the entirety of your computing and support environment to ensure that your data center will support you current and future applications needs.

The recent momentum behind the “green movement” within the data center community interjects a new consideration into the design and planning process of data center facilities, but the challenges of making data centers greener also opens up opportunities to make these facilities better support a company’s business goals.

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Understanding the elements that you can control is a key to this process. By asking the right questions about those elements that you can control, you will be able to make common sense decisions about how to plan, design and operate your data center in a manner that meets your business goals and your green goals. And this process will also allow you to achieve those goals without needing to employ dubious methods of ecological “slight of hand” such as the purchase of “carbon credits”.

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Value engineering is typically used as a cost-reduction exercise within the data center industry. The typical execution of value engineering activities in most organizations is a systematic series of meetings in which design requirements are flogged unmercifully to wring out all “excess” cost. Then, once all interested parties agree that no more dollars can be shaken out, the search for a site begins. This round-peg-in-a-square-hole approach may please the finance department, but it typically results in the construction of a facility that does not possess the capabilities to adequately support existing requirements or future growth.