What You Need To Know About Building A Data Center For Your Small Business
If you own a small business that relies on an in-house data center for your computer-networking needs, it is crucial to protect and maintain your equipment in an appropriate setting. Keeping your network equipment in a standard room with no protection from extreme temperatures, intruders and natural catastrophes is a recipe for disaster. The following guide can help you plan the construction and maintenance of a suitable in-house data center.
Room Specifications
When you choose a room in your building to house your servers, routers and other equipment, make sure that it is easily accessible to your in-house information technology staff. If possible, house your equipment in a room that is also centrally located so cables can run to and from other parts of the building without covering a lot of distance.
The room should also be large enough to accommodate growth as your business becomes more successful and requires more equipment. The last thing you want is an overcrowded room that becomes warm too fast causing equipment to overheat. Other basic requirements for a room should include:
- Ceilings high enough to accommodate racks that can hold several towers
- No windows in order to isolate sound and protect the room from intruders
- A wide opening for oversize doors so you can easily move equipment in and out
- Anti-static flooring
- A fire suppression system
- Easy access to the building's power grid
Once you determine where you want to build your server room, you should consult with a commercial electrician, an HVAC specialist and a data center maintenance firm to help you create detailed blueprints and formulate a plan to upgrade the room to fit your needs in accordance with local building codes.
Temperature Control
Round the clock monitoring of the temperature inside a data center is crucial to protect equipment from overheating, a problem that can lead to downtime and that affects equipment reliability. Keeping the room at a stable temperature also keeps humidity under control.
The ideal temperature range for a server room should be between 64.4 and 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The relative humidity should be kept between 40 and 60 percent.
Monitoring the temperature in the server room requires more than just installing a thermometer on the wall. Each area where air enters and exits servers must be monitored. Rack systems that you purchase to hold the servers should be equipped with temperature sensors at multiple levels. The sensors will notify your in-house IT employees and your data center maintenance contractor when temperatures escalate to levels that could cause an outage and damage your equipment.
Security and Equipment Protection
Only authorized personnel in your firm should have access to your servers. The room that houses your data center should not be a shared space or out in the open.
Outside of yourself and your IT staff, the room should be off limits at all times. There are many ways to secure a server rooms with door locks, passkeys and other methods. But you should also seriously consider biometric access controls for the room to prevent intruders from using stolen passkeys to access the room.
You can integrate biometric access with a video surveillance system as well, so you can monitor each time someone accesses the room and even have alerts sent to you each time someone unlocks the doors.
Furthermore, in order to protect the valuable equipment inside the server room, you should draft some strict rules for your IT staff including the following:
- No food or drinks in the server room.
- Do not bring unauthorized personnel in the server room as guests.
- Never leave the door propped open
Maintenance
As your server room equipment ages and your business expands, it will be necessary to upgrade and replace dated equipment. It is essential to have a reliable data center hardware maintenance contractor on call when you need to make changes to server configurations, replace defective servers and re-evaluate the energy-efficiency of your equipment.
If you experience explosive growth, an experienced contractor can even re-build a data center space from the ground up or move all of your equipment to a bigger space in your building.
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