Curious about designing a new server room? You’ve come to the right place.
Server Room Design in 29 Words
When designing a server room, understand your IT needs and regulations. Next, choose the configuration, equipment, and principles to incorporate, such as scalability. Consider hiring an outside firm to help.
This helpful guide shares valuable tips and insights on a wide range of server room design-related issues and topics, from where to begin and common configuration styles to key principles and considerations regarding layout, equipment, and execution.
Maybe you’re building a new facility and looking at a space. Perhaps you’re planning to renovate an existing server closet. Either way, creating a room to optimize your IT operations can be intimidating, and you may not know where to start.
Let’s begin with the basics.
While no two server rooms are exactly alike, there are several fundamental steps everyone should follow when embarking on the road toward the perfect design. These might not be as exciting as strategizing where to install racks and cooling units, but they’re essential not to skip. Doing so will likely require you to come back to make time-consuming and expensive adjustments.
The Basics
1. Understand Your Requirements.
If you’re contemplating designs and have not yet established your IT requirements, or at the very least, determined what hardware you’ll be housing, you’re getting a bit ahead of yourself.
Understanding your requirements is a critical first step to assessing the needs of your server room. There’s no such thing as a generic server room that will work for every IT operation. Sure, there are certain staples of server room design you’ll likely include no matter what, such as server racks and cooling systems, but the equipment you use and the way in which you arrange it will have a lot to do with the data and applications you plan to run.
This is a good time to begin involving your IT team or a consultant, if you haven’t done so already. They will have a good idea of which configuration and equipment will work best for your operational needs. Since they’ll be managing the infrastructure each day, they must be involved in its design.
2. Understand the Space.
Measure it out. Understand exactly what you’re working with. Taking these measurements before you begin designing will make it easier in the long run.
Keep in mind: It’s not just square footage. Knowing where windows, doors, and electrical circuits are is also essential, especially when it comes time to design your server room’s workflow and cooling strategy.
3. Understand Your Local Codes and Regulations.
You could design the best server room in the world, perfectly configured for your exact needs. This would all be for naught, however, if you didn’t take your local codes and regulations into consideration. Organizations such as the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and your state’s building authorities set strict standards for electrical safety, fire suppression, structural integrity, and more. Codes vary between states, counties, and even cities, so it is essential to familiarize yourself with these before starting your design—even if you’ve designed server rooms elsewhere.
Finding your local codes and regulations online is easy, but they can sometimes be hard to understand. Consider making an appointment with a local inspector or a qualified design consultant to get more information about how to stay compliant with your area’s laws.
The actual principles of server room design.
To start, server rooms should have spaces for the following five necessary functions:
Equipment installation
Cooling and ventilation
Power management
Cable management
Security
While there are virtually limitless ways to incorporate these, here are several standard configurations for server rooms.
Hot and Cold Aisle Configuration
As the industry standard suggests, this layout arranges server racks to separate hot and cold airflow for efficient cooling. Typically, the racks are positioned front-to-back to create cold-air intakes, while the backs face each other to form hot-exhaust aisles. However, depending on the specific needs of your room and your cooling capacity, you may decide to change the function of the aisles by adding containment systems that better suit your operation.
Open Configuration
In this style, open-frame racks are utilized instead of locked cabinets for better airflow and accessibility. This is commonly seen in secure network closets and might be a good option for an operation looking to increase ventilation consistency or even just offer technicians an easier way to access cabling and hardware ports. This style, however, creates greater pressure to maintain strict physical room security, so you’ll want to weigh this when considering such a configuration.
Zoning Configuration
In a Zoning Configuration, the server room is strictly divided into zones for specific functions. While the exact zones depend on your needs and preferences, standard zones in this style of server room include:
Storage
Networking
Power Distribution
Each zone has all the required infrastructure and cabling for the equipment it houses—eliminating the need to run cables across the entire room. For instance, a networking zone should be fully equipped with patch panels, switches, and fiber runners. In contrast, a power distribution zone should include ample UPS units and electrical panels within easy reach.
Once you’ve decided which, if any, of these configurations might work best for your IT operation, you’ll want to start getting more into the specifics of how it will run.
Like we’ve stated, no two server rooms are exactly alike. So you’ll want to decide which design principles you find most valuable, and incorporate them into your plans. Some significant aspects to consider include…
1. Simplicity & Space Efficiency
Simplicity and space efficiency are all about making the most of limited space. Doing this successfully comes just as much from knowing what your server room doesn’t need as understanding what it does need.
Communicate with your IT team on what will be necessary for your operations. That way, you won’t be sacrificing valuable space that could be put to better use for cooling or power infrastructure.
2. Flow
When you design a server room with flow in mind, your goal is to lay it out in a way that most accommodates the movements taking place inside. When the flow of everything, from IT staff to replacement hardware, moves in a logical direction, it can significantly reduce confusion and accidents. Generally, all IT facilities have a flow of activities that includes some form of the following steps:
Receiving > Staging > Installation > Maintenance > Decommissioning
3. Flexibility & Modularity
Technologies change. Your server room should be able to adapt along with it. Whether you have sudden capacity demands, need to adapt your hardware to new applications, or update it to reflect evolving IT strategies, your server room should be able to keep up.
Consider including server racks and modular power distribution units so that you can adjust the arrangement of your room when your operational needs change.
4. Cooling and Ventilation
Cooling is a crucial part of maintaining the health and availability of your IT hardware. While this is a function that rests mainly on appropriately sized and well-maintained HVAC systems, there are ways to design your room with thermal management in mind that can make cooling much more efficient in the long run.
Pay close attention to your equipment’s heat load and layout when considering cooling, as these will determine whether to use hot/cold aisle containment, in-row cooling, or liquid cooling solutions.
5. Power Management
Power management may not be as visible as racks and servers, but it is critical for a resilient IT operation. For larger server rooms, a dedicated electrical panel and robust power distribution units (PDUs) are necessary.
If uptime is a priority, you may want to consider designs with redundant power supplies, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), and backup generators for an unobstructed power source.
6. Security
The benefits of a secure design extend beyond the obvious advantages of protecting your data from theft. It’s also suitable for your regulatory compliance. While a great deal of a server room’s security is related to the network, it also comes from careful physical arrangement of the space itself.
For example, placing server rooms in interior spaces without windows and implementing access control systems will reduce the risk of unauthorized entry and protect critical infrastructure.
Be sure to consider what equipment your server room will need.
The equipment that will go into your server room will significantly affect its design. Large pieces of infrastructure, such as cooling units and server racks, require adequate space, and most will also need to be near high-amperage electrical circuits.
While the specific equipment needs of your server room will depend on your IT requirements, several pieces are essential to any IT operation. Among these:
- Server racks and cabinets
- Cooling systems (e.g., air conditioners, CRAC units)
- Power distribution units (PDUs) and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS)
- Cable management tools
- Monitoring systems for temperature, humidity, and power usage
You Don’t Have to Go at It Alone
Even if you have a crystal-clear vision, the actual process of designing a server room and creating plans that can be handed off to your building team can be challenging. Consider working with an outside firm to help you design it. That way, you’ll have a dedicated team of professionals who know the process.
