It’s well established that large data centers are seeking cheap power. That criteria can lead to locations where substation improvements are required to provide the redundant power paths that are a key criteria of a modern data center. From a very basic perspective, power should enter the site from different substations following route diversity. Each substation should be sized to handle the entire projected load.
Practically, however, the utility company or the customer may need to engage the services of Power Engineers who specialize in distribution systems and substation design to optimize for the location and to satisfy specific utility requirements.
The intersection of cheap power, available fiber capacity, and low real estate costs has been the recipe for data center site selection. John Rath makes an important observation that “Businesses large and small want their infrastructure in close proximity to their business offices” (read more from John’s data center site selection paper).
This means that data centers will continue to be opened in areas that require upgraded electrical infrastructure. This could range from simple increases in electrical service to full blown re-engineering of the utility feeds that service the desired site.
Modern data centers require the appropriate electrical infrastrucutre of capacity and route diversity to serve their desired purpose.
Data Center Checklist, Data Center Relocation, Data Center Site Selection
Wyoming earmarked $1 billion in 2004 to improve power transmission capacity with four projects already underway as a result. Texas also understands the critical need to invest in the transmission grid and is proceeding with plans to put almost $5 billion to work to capitalize on power transmission originating from wind farms.
It’s not as sexy as building a mega-datacenter, but both States stand to benefit nicely in the long term by improving their power grids. It could also touch off a decades-long arms race to improve the capacity of power grids in key areas as these projects require planning and lead-time to complete.
Data center site selection criteria that seek to be located closer to the power generation source could be impacted as these projects approach completion.
Track the investment in the power grid infrastructure and you’ve got a five year window into the potential location of many power-hungry facilities — data centers included.
Wyoming and Texas enjoy high untapped wind energy potential and both realize the importance of getting that engergy on the power grid by investing in that infrastructure.
Data Center Site Selection
Moving a data center should be a systematic task with plenty of planning and execution time to produce a solid relocation plan. More often, it’s a scramble to meet an objective set by executive management as part of a larger effort. Some common executive management misconceptions include:
- Moving a data center is easy.
- The Information Technology Staff can both move the data center and do their real jobs.
- There will be zero down time during the move and there will be no new expenditures or duplicate equipment purchased.
- Moving over the weekend is the best time to move.
- It should be simple to construct the data center move budget from a Google search.
With that as a partial backdrop, you are searching for data center move plans, data center relocation budgets, and data center movers. You think about writing a data center relocation RFP (Request for Proposal) and find yourself overwhelmed with perfecting a statement of work (SOW). Meanwhile, your executive management wants to know how much this is going to cost and the scramble to build a budget begins as your search for average per square foot costs to move a data center.
You reason that Google has rescued you before and you search harder to locate elements of your relocation plan. But when you come up short, then what?
Our free data center moving guide can help you understand the complexity of a data center relocation. Educating your executive management is a critical and necessary element for a successful data center move. While Google can help you search for the puzzle pieces of a data center relocation, we can help you save money and avoid costly mistakes with our data center move planning and implementation services.
Corporate Relocations, Data Center Checklist, Data Center Relocation
Data Center Knowledge does a great job of aggregating the downtime woes that continue to manifest in ways that should or could have been addressed.
There continues to be a lesson learned from decades of computing infrastructure knowledge that stubbornly refuses to translate into a lesson remembered.
Lesson Learned: Diversity Defeats Downtime
Within the data center, diversity principles include:
- Load Balancers that spread traffic to different servers
- Diverse power feeds to equipment
- Diverse network feeds to equipment
Geographic diversity means having the ability to run services or at least the ability to re-direct services to other data centers.
- No excuses for failing to diversify your external and internal DNS. Without a way to access your DNS records and re-direct your e-mail and web destinations, you are at the mercy of your provider should a service interruption strike.
- No excuses for failing to diversify your e-mail. You need to be able to send and receive e-mail during a major service interruption.
- No excuses for failing to have a Business Continuity Plan. As the downtime stories continue to illustrate, key elements of your plan need to include what you are going to do when your infrastructure is overwhelmed.
Corporate Relocations, Data Center Checklist, Data Center Relocation
