A Modern Pantheon

A modern data center still shares many aspects with ancient architecture, structurally and in service. The form literally follows the function. The purpose of both the Pantheon and a data center is to provide services. To provide services, its requirements for continual functioning must be met. This is the design team's primary concern. The design of the data center must revolve around the care and feeding of the service providing equipment.

These functional requirements of the data center are:

• A place to locate computer, storage, and networking devices safely and securely

• To provide the power needed to maintain these devices

• To provide a temperature-controlled environment within the parameters needed to run these devices

• To provide connectivity to other devices both inside and outside the data center

In the design philosophy of this book, these needs must be met and in the most efficient way possible. The efficiency of the data center system relies entirely on the efficiency of the design. The fundamental principles of a data center philosophy should be your guiding principles.

The phrase "design philosophy" could have many different meanings. For the purposes of this book we'll use the following definition: A design philosophy is the application of structure to the functional requirements of an object based on a reasoned set of values.