Assessing Viable Locations for Your Data Center
When the time comes for your business to build a server environment, it is essential that the people responsible for the Data Center's design have an opportunity to provide input into where it is constructed. Traditionally, upper management decides what property to purchase, based upon a variety of a company's wants, needs, and business drivers. Other purchase considerations might include a parcel's price tag, its proximity to a talented labor pool, advantageous tax rates, or the desire to have a corporate presence in a particular geographic area. Whatever the drivers are, a property's suitability to house a Data Center must be among them. Purchasing or leasing a site without considering this greatly hampers the Data Center's capability to protect company servers and networking devices. Not making this a consideration also invariably leads to additional expense, either to retrofit the land's undesirable characteristics or to add more infrastructure to compensate for them.
An ideal Data Center location is one that offers many of the same qualities that a Data Center itself provides a company:
Protection from hazards
Easy accessibility
Features that accommodate future growth and change
These qualities are fairly obvious, like saying that it is easier for an ice chest to keep drinks chilled when it is also cold outside. Less apparent are what specific characteristics improve or hamper a property's usability as a Data Center location and why.
Building Codes and the Data Center Site
The first step when evaluating an undeveloped property's suitability as a Data Center site is a determination of how the property is zoned. Zoning controls whether a server environment is allowed