Data center design: User preferences and budget

In this series, we're reviewing how to plan and design an effective data center for your enterprise. Establishing user preferences, budgets and a timeline are critical to planning your new data center, and a well-planned facility can ensure high availability and power interruption protection.

Modern data centers need to be reliable in order to allow for this high availability. Maintaining a working budget and analyzing costs while collecting user preferences is critical to making sure your new data center can not only provide power outage protection but is also within your company's budget. 

Stakeholder preferences
After the design concept has been chosen, collect preferences from stakeholders. By selecting the design concept first, you will stick closer to standard designs. Otherwise, letting user preferences drive the design can significantly raise costs as well as the timeline. 

All of these stakeholders are affected by the performance of your critical environment, so it's important to get their feedback and ideas on what they're going to need. A poorly designed data center that doesn't adequately provide for these users can affect every level of your company. 

Cost analysis
As with any project, budgets can vary based on the needs of your company. Schneider Electric has provided a helpful data center cost calculator. Use this handy tool to input the different components of your design needs and get an idea of what kind of budget you're going to need. The calculator allows you to identify the preferred characteristics of your data center, including:

• Floor space
• Cooling requirements
• UPS system and other redundancies
• Load

As you make your selections, the tool updates and presents cost by system and power cost by subsystem, as well as the estimated overall cost. The calculator can give you a general idea of the budget you'll need to plan for but not an exact quote. 

Bring these estimated costs back to your stakeholders, so they can see what it's going to take to get the project done as such. The presentation may help to pare down some of the more unnecessary costs in the preliminary plan. The result will be a budget aligned with your company's requirements. 

Planning for data center power protection is a major undertaking, but Custom Networks can help. If you'd like to set up a more efficient data center for your IT needs, the Custom Networks team can help! Our consultants are available to perform an Energy STEP1 Audit on your site. Our factory-trained and certified field service engineers can come to your workspace and analyze your IT efficiency, ensuring your systems are running at peak optimization.