Every data center project begins with the business plan and business requirements in mind. This is fundamentally the starting point and the first building blocks of a data center project. An enterprise with intention to build a data center facility for their own internal use may have an easier time to establish and understand this starting point. But for a Data Center service provider offering co-location and hosting services, then it gets a little bit complicated.
In reality, regardless of how closely the initial design matches with the business requirements, in the long run, data center facilities rarely achieve the efficiency, capacity and operational targets defined in their initial designs. This is because a data center environment is never static and like a living organism, it is always evolving. In the day to day operations, there will be people / human traffic, periodic changes, expansions, upgrades, introduction of new equipment, de-commissioning of aged equipment, and other external influences. As time goes by, newer technologies, with possibly higher density equipment, requiring substantial incremental power and cooling capacity, will replace aged equipment. Pressures to maximize utilization and reduce costs, will lead towards consolidation of data centers into few locations, adoption of virtualization technologies, causing changes in operational procedures, etc. All these are part and parcel of the evolution of a data center environment, and no matter how you strive to achieve an equilibrium, as soon as you think you have reached an equilibrium, the operating conditions will likely change again.
For Data Center service providers, who are like hotels, they will rarely know when their next customers will be coming through their doors, or what kind of equipment these customers will be hosting at their facility. How do you plan the design of a facility for such requirement when these requirements are not known at present day?
