How can you ensure a smooth process?
Do not let prince be your guiding factor. When selecting a professional services firm, have a weighted ranking system when evaluating potential candidates (experience, references, overall impression, price, and approach). It is important to have synergy with your vendors, as much of your communication will be over email or phone, even with vendors who are local. I also recommend taking meeting minutes after conference calls and distributing them after the call, similar to construction meetings.
Construction meetings are very important and are more effective when scheduled on Tuesday or Wednesday, this allows for Friday deadlines and helps set the direction of what needs to be accomplished that week as well as to plan to any weekend work ahead of time.
How do you know who to involve in the process?
The team needs to be diverse both internally and externally. Start with an executive sponsorship, followed by an external data center consultant. The following are also key:
- Architect: many jurisdictions require an architect be involved as the design authority as you have life safety considerations. So, a firm with data center experience is a positive attribute that can be augmented with a data center consultant.
- Engineering: (mechanical, electrical, structural) all of these trades will be required and their knowledge of how these different systems work together is imperative.
- Move consultant: the task of moving your critical IT infrastructure should not be left to your local office moving company. This is an important detailed task which involves building rack elevations, labeling devices, labeling cables, unracking, packing and moving properly in bins, followed by unpacking and installation at the new location.
A list of imperatives.
- Process: stick to the design process, by skipping steps we often find that the result is change orders and schedule delays.
- Design team: it is important to have the design team involved in the construction process to offer continuity and consistent results.
- Contractors: clients are often initially please with the low bid price but that can quickly change to displeasure in the long term when the contractor produce poor quality work due to inexperience. It is imperative to select contractors that have familiarity working in data center environments.
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Beyond the planning and after the implementation phase the process starts again. Now it is a matter of validating the space learning from the technology adaptations and making adjustments to the data center. As well as preparing for future phases.
ReplyDeleteWith all of these concepts it is important to validate the approach. We have done this using CFD (computational Fluid Dynamic) modeling software. this allows also to prove the energy savings and compare to other optional approaches. This approach is accepted as industry best practice.
Some sites and resources to review:
http://www.ptsdcs.com/cfdservices.asp
http://www.ptsdcs.com/datacentercoolchallenge.asp
http://www.ptsdcs.com/datacenterdesign.asp
When it comes to the construction phase I generally agree with the mentioned guidelines. However, construction is the first, very complex, but still, the very first stage of real fun, which begins during migration phase.
ReplyDeleteWell, maybe before actual migration phase, which is an obvious step after successful data center construction, one should consider in-depth testing of the whole infrastructure? In my opinion, such tests, before the decision about moving our services form old site to the new one, are a kind of our insurance policy for the (unknown) future. There are some companies which are offering such services - the best option is to go with some tests authorized by external, independent body, of course.
I believe such approach is good not only for clients which want to build new data center and move their services there from the old site, but also for the companies which are planning to offer data center services for other parties (collocation and outsourcing businesses).
Anyway, thanks for synthetic article with guidelines, which results directly form the industry experience.