Building Your Own Datacentre

Wizzard

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Wizzard submitted a new Article:

Building Your Own Datacentre

This is the follow on from http://adminextra.com/forum/articles/569-so-you-want-set-up-your-own-hosting-company.html.

Building your own Datacentre

So you have reached the top, youve exhausted all of your options, now you think its time to take on the big boys. This is where it really becomes serious, once you do go down this path there is no turning back.

You have 2 options here when considering setting up your datacentre, you can find a plot of land and get the relevant permissions to build on the land or you can find an existing warehouse and again gaining the permissions to convert an existing warehouse.

Before you even get to the breaking the turf ceremony or you wield the hammer in anger, there is a lot of planning to go into your datacentre.

At the planning stage you have to consider where you want to build the datacente if you are going from scratch or find a warehouse that can be easily converted without any hidden costs.

Planning the infrastructure

I would say get all of your infrastructure plans drafted up before looking for a suitable place, that way, your plans can be altered to suit what can fit on the plot of land or what can be placed into an existing building.

When planning the infrastructure you have to take into account the following:

Power
Networking
Bandwidth Providers (multiple in case one provider goes down for maintenance or cables get cut)
Air conditioning/cooling
Fire suppressant systems
Security Systems
NOC (Network Operations Centre)

Staff costs.

All should be planned with future expansion in mind, no point in putting in a system only to discover it is going to be a nightmare to upgrade when more capacity is needed. Also remember redundancy, all systems need a backup in case of an emergency.

Always consult experts for all of the above, never cut costs when setting up your own datacentre, it will come back to bite you when you least expect it.

Bottom line it is very expensive to set up your own datacentre, so really think about it if you do want to go down this route.

Read more about this article here...
 
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Paul M

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So .... how many of you are planning to build a data centre :p
 

Lisa

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It's on my to-do list for this afternoon :timebomb:
 

Blind Bandit

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If I needed that much space. I would just do co location. Or rent out a suite in a telecom hotel.
 

cheat_master30

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I don't think many people are going to go quite this far, but nice article anyway. A bit lacking in detail though in my opinion.
 

Wizzard

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cheat-master30 said:
I don't think many people are going to go quite this far, but nice article anyway. A bit lacking in detail though in my opinion.

It depends if you want to sit through a multipost article :)
 

Cupara

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Wizzard said:
It depends if you want to sit through a multipost article :)

Do it man, throw up a multi part article in regards to this topic. I'm sure it will help a lot of peeps out who are thinking of running their own data center.
 

Wizzard

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Mythotical said:
Do it man, throw up a multi part article in regards to this topic. I'm sure it will help a lot of peeps out who are thinking of running their own data center.

Ok, I'll do it :)

Give me a couple of days :D
 

MjrNuT

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Wizzard said:
It depends if you want to sit through a multipost article :D

To reiterate cheat_master's point, you'd really need to fill it with meat to show the true gravity of such a feat. :)

Breaking ground, for instance, involves such substantial costs/investements just to get networking infrastructure to the site!!

Just sayin' you've got a good start, but if you added some more meat to your list of those items, for example, people would have a clearer picture. Not saying it needs to be taken to the full end. Just the tip, at least I think so for this group to understand Datacenter's, which is what I think you are trying to get across also.
 
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