These days, when anyone talks about data center design, you can't go terribly far without stating your availability and security policy. These will be basic drivers. Indeed, for a sufficiently high level of availability, you have to have more than one data center (or backup at a colocation facility).
One of my pet peeves -- everyone talks about fire protection, but very few people talk about protection from fire protection. In my career, I've never had a data center fire (well, magic smoke pouring once, several in network labs, and lots in medical labs), but I have experienced four center failures due to firefighting water cascading down from elsewhere in the building. You need experienced people for electrical as well as electronic design. I like the term POES -- Plain Old Electrical Service -- to contrast with Plain Old Telephone Service. POES isn't adequate for data centers. A nice paper: [Budenski] Dale Budenski, SR RCDD / MEC, The Wiremold Company. "Electrical Considerations for Telecommunications" http://www.wiremold.com/commercial/onlinesupport/technical/papers/telecommunications.html Annlee Hines and I address different aspects of availability and data center design in our books. Annlee's _Planning for Survivable Networks_ is definitive on establishing requirements for the data center and network. My _Building Service Provider Networks_ discusses building ISP facilities, and my _WAN Survival Guide_ gets into network availability and server failover models. Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=74272&t=74126 -------------------------------------------------- **Please support GroupStudy by purchasing from the GroupStudy Store: http://shop.groupstudy.com FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html
