New Building, IT Dept, Server Room Layout

[wgechter]

Hello, I would like some advice on designing a server room and IT Dept. Specs or things to keep in mind when planning a new area in a new building.

Here's the current layout. We are a large practice, consisting of 5 doctor's offices. We are all electronic with electronic medical records and prescription printers in all rooms. There are 2 of us, net admin and jr. net admin. We plan to expand to 3 or 4 people in a couple years. We have about 1000 sq ft combined of working, office, server, wiring closet, room right now in three different buildings. All buildings are wireless.
We are moving into one large building with a basement, first, and second floor.

We would like to put in a subfloor, but would like suggestions on air conditioners, how many cc for area? What a good location in the building is for the server room and dept? Wiring and closets? How many jacks per room on avg? And if anyone had pictures of their server room that would help a lot. Any suggestions? Thanks,
Wendi

 

[sleipnir214]

Heck, a lot of this depends on your budget.

For example, raised flooring is cool and sexy, but expensive. And having been exposed to both situations, I'd rather be standing on a chair fooling around with wires in a channel near the ceiling than standing in a dark hole in the middle of the server room -- but that's just me.

As far as air conditioning, contact your hardware vendors. They can probably tell you the BTU/hour thermal output of each of your devices. Total that up and add an enormous margin -- say twice or three times what you need. Buy that much air conditioning.

But before you worry about A/C, I suggest you worry about power. Will your server room have enough juice to run everything? Are you going to need backup power? If so, what are you going to get? Huge UPSes with automatic graceful shutdowns on all servers? Generators? Are you going to try to power the A/C system if you are providing generated power to the server room?

You say the building is wireless, but you talk about jacks per room -- that confuses me.

But if you're wireless, have you taken network security into account? It'd be a shame to have some wackado with a WiFi network adapter and a Pringles can screwing around with your data.

If you have a preferred vendor, their sales reptiles will also gladly provide the design expertise of their tech guys. Especially if you're going to buy a bunch of stuff from them.

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TANSTAAFL!

 

[KornGeek]

Wow. I think that post pretty much covered everything. The only thing I can add is my opinion on raised floors vs. overhead cabling. I agree that raised floors look nice, but are much more difficult to maintain.

The best setup I have been a part of used patch panels at the top of each rack that went to a rack of patch panels. We then could easily change connections by simply going to the rack of patch panels instead of going device to device. The overhead cabling was put down once, and cleaned up once. Because we weren't changing this, it stayed looking nice. The only warning here is that documentation is key. You need to keep track of which port on each patch panel goes to which port on each device. If you can manage that, maintenance becomes easy.

 

[sleipnir214]

Yeah, I can't say enough about documenting the network in your server room. Mark the places where cables plug in. Mark the cables themselves. If your mini-me stands still too long, mark him.

Blow the few extra bucks on those velcro bundle ties -- forget those one-use off-white ratchet things the cops use when they know they're going to run out of handcuffs.

Buy name-brand wire, connectors, and especially tools. The tools are obvious, but wires and connectors make a big difference, too.

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!

 

[AIXSPadmin]

I have been in both raised floor - very nice, clean; but you have to pull floor tiles to do any work. But this was in a Fortune 500 data center that encompassed 5 mainframes, hundreds of NT servers (egads!), Sun E10k's, IBM SP frames, IBM ESS disk, a SAN network, routers, hubs, and a NOC for the nation.

Contrast that with where I was before that had cable coming through conduit in the ceiling in a small room (approx. 7x14) and had 10's of telephone blocks, a PBX, voice mail system, patch panels and 2 AIX RS/6000's, all without A/C. There was a few times that the AIX systems reached their temp max and shutdown; so I can atest to the need for proper cooling.

But the reason for the raised floor was to properly cool the old mainframes that cooled from bottom to top, but today's computers cool from the front to back or side to side. If you're going to use a raised floor, never-ever-run power or data under the floor.

Given that below are some recommendations:

Fire suppression, the industry standard today is FM 200, is another thing to look at while planning.
You also want data and voice wiring combined instead of just one which will give you more flexibility. Try to leave at least 3 feet of spacing between the racks and any side walls. use 5 feet center to center between rows of racks, 5-foot aisles, and 26.5 inches center to center for racks next to each other. The 26.5 inches comes from 20.5-inch outside measurements of the rack itself as well as space for a 6-inch cable duct next to each rack. Allow 5-foot wide aisles, leave some space for HVAC equipment. A good rule of thumb is to assume that you're going to need about 20 amps of power per rack in the facility. I recommend making sure that you can provide 210V as well as 120V power. A rule of thumb is to use 1 ton of cooling for every 20kVA of power. If you go with no raised floor use anti-static flooring. For air flow, assume that you'll need one to two total air changes through your facility per hour. This is enough air flow that you may feel a slight breeze inside your facility, you want the air moving past your computers to draw the heat away from them, eliminating hot spots. The air should be filtered to remove dust and other contaminants. The air should also be humidified to cut down on static discharge between the computers and their operators.

 

[sleipnir214]

And don't forget grounding. A lot of buildings tend to have their power systems modified in part over and over as tenants move out, so things can get squirrely with power.

Where I once worked, we found we had an 80-volt ground fault potential between two of our server racks when we were installing them. We discovered it when one of our guys put a hand on each of the two server racks to bend down to help with some wiring. He was a big guy, like 6'2", and it knocked him on his butt.

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!

 

[wgechter]

Thanks for all the help and keep it coming!! We are wireless and wired. We have many printers and workstations that are all wired but all the doctors use wireless laptops I hope that helps the wireless/jack question.

As for location, most would say basement, is that correct? Central part of the building, anything to keep in mind here?

We have been trying to get a hold of our vendor though they are being a slow in getting a response to us and thought this would be quicker.

Thanks for all the suggestions!! I appreciate them,
Wendi

 

[AIXSPadmin]

The location MUST NOT have windows to the outside placed in computer rooms. The windows also cast sunlight on servers unneccesarily introducing heat to the computer rooms. Computer rooms SHOULD be within the interior of the data center. The computer room SHOULD have temperature between 55 and 75 degrees and a humidity of between 20 and 80 percent. There MUST be regular offsite backups of essential information.

 

[AIXSPadmin]

A reason against a basement location is mostly because of the possibility of flooding, however, most large data centers are in the basement due to physical security of the location.