Have you planned for these five Server Room essentials?

If you’re setting up a company server room or private data center for your organization, make sure you have a plan in place for these essential elements.

A server room is home to essential hardware like servers and data storage devices. It may seem obvious, but it bears repeating – when purchasing your servers, first calculate your current requirement. Keep a percentage of additional capacity available, to allow for future expansion.

1. The servers!

Cabinets that form efficient storage for your hardware, server racks offer security, hygiene, ease of access and access control. At Hardy Racks, our highly cost-effective server rack solutions are structured to suit our customers’ budgets. Beyond existing requirements, do maintain empty racks to the tune of at least 10%, for painless future expansion.

2. Their home: Server racks

Connectivity, both within and without the server room, is crucial to a successful private data center. Plan for secure Internet and Voice connectivity for the server room. Cabling within the server room needs to be managed neatly to allow staff to understand the data flow. Neat cabling can be concealed in floor or ceiling tracks, and each cable should be labeled and color-coded wherever possible.

3. Infrastructure: Cabling, Power and Connectivity

Servers draw a significant amount of electricity. If possible, make your data center self-sufficient, or provide a second power source as a redundancy. Even seconds of downtime can result in serious losses for the organization, so it’s important to install a UPS for uninterrupted power supply in case of short power cuts, and to protect from potential power surges.

Your servers contain precious data and information. Guard them against breaches, burglary and natural disasters, with the right security measures and SOPs. Maintain fire and disaster plans, equipment and escape paths, and regularly update them as required. Deliver regular training to your employees to ensure that, in case of emergency, your team is not caught on the back foot.

4. Security against theft and disaster

To protect your data center from physical threats, set up access control and monitoring measures. Hardy Racks’ secure data centers offer in-built access control systems.

Servers require the right environment to operate optimally. They generate a vast quantity of heat and need dedicated cooling systems. Your servers can be damaged if they operate in the wrong ambient environment – extend their life with cooling and dehumidification systems to maintain exactly the right temperature and humidity in the server room.

5. Climate control: HVAC for your server room

If this all seems a little intimidating, try an all-in-one solution such as the Hardy Racks secure data center. With in-built access control systems, battery backup, and of course server racks of the size you require, these PFM data centers are ideal plug-and-play solutions for small server room requirements.

+1: Modular data centers

Managing a data center is a major task. Allow us to help you with at least part of it. Do consult us before you purchase your server racks and set up your server room.