Is your data center designed for scalability, flexibility, and resilience?
There are hundreds of ways data centers can be designed but there are three common paradigms: Scalability, flexibility, and resilience. You’ve got to keep these in mind with every design plan. And here’s why:
Data creation is estimated to hit 175 zettabytes by 2025. That’s just two years away. Brings the importance of scalability into perspective almost immediately doesn’t it? With more data being transmitted every second, demands on data center infrastructure will continue to grow in zetta-leaps.
Scalability
Data centers need to be designed keeping in mind the continuously increased networking, computing, and storage requirements. If not, you’re going to be caught off guard when you suddenly find yourself faced with a torrent of infrastructural requirements that you simply cannot accommodate. And that’s going to lead to costly downtime.
For example, a scale-up server increases its workload capacity by adding memory and processing power, rather than more server units. You could also consider using a rack unit as the primary planning factor for estimating the space and power requirements of your data center. Each rack configuration should reflect total power, space, and floor-loading demands, and that way you can design a layout for your data center.
So, keep in mind scale and provide sufficient infrastructure to facilitate demanding IT requirements such as increasing storage and network needs. Provide room for growth in space, power, and cooling, keeping costs in mind.
Flexibility, they say, is the most needed ability for a data center. It allows data centers to bounce back from any sudden changes. For instance, while a data centre location is fixed, the building itself can be designed to be flexible in terms of space and resource utilisation. ‘
Flexibility
For instance, try opting for single-story, windowless structures, with large open floor plans.
These offer better physical security and create a more flexible space configuration. Consider building floor sizes with large column spacing (40 feet or so) and higher ceiling clearances (14 feet is great) from the structural slab to the lowest structural member. Even making your airflow management foolproof would give you more room to experiment with the design of the room. Racks with adjustable depths are another way to go to gain the flexibility to scale up or down instantly, depending on your needs.
Resiliency helps to minimize downtime and ensures business continuity. In a data center, it is the ability of the data center to recover quickly from disruption and continue operating even when there has been an equipment failure or power outage, or other disruption. That means everything from server and network to storage system management must contribute to resilience. For example, let’s say, a server’s power supply fails. It would mean that the server fails and work is disrupted until it is repaired. Resilience here would be investing in an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) so the backup power supply turns on automatically when the power supply fails and keeps the server running until it can be fixed.
Resilience
Hardy Racks offers state-of-the-art hardware and accessories, which can help you rise to the challenges of designing a scalable, flexible, and resilient data center. From rack solutions to cable and aisle management, get in touch with our experts to understand how to design an efficient data center.


Hardy Racks is one of the leading server rack manufacturers in Chennai. We are also a trusted name in the industry for the installation, customization, and optimization of data center enclosures and accessories such as PDUs, fiber raceways, and aisle containment. Our experience also equips us to provide expert data center consulting services.
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