Preface

"Omne ignotum pro magnifico."

” Tacitus

Designing a data center, whether a new facility or retrofitting an existing one, is no easy, simple task. If you don't interact with people well, if you can't communicate effectively with people who are not in your area of expertise, if you don't enjoy solving difficult problems, if you want a simple, stress-free work life, don't design a data center !!!

Okay, now that all the loafing cowards have stopped reading, we can start talking about what this book hopes to accomplish.

This book attempts to walk you through the design process and offers a method that can be used to create a design that meets the requirements of your data center. This book is not a book of designs. It is a tool to work through your requirements and find solutions to create the best design for those requirements.

Early in my career as a system administrator, someone said to me, "Data centers are black magic. They are not understandable or discernible by mere mortals." I can't print my response to that person, but that brief confrontational conversation stuck in my brain. I can tell you, designing data centers isn't "black magic." A data center is a complex and interdependent environment, however, it can be broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces. Methodologies can be used that make designing data centers understandable and discernible by mere mortals . To that person many years ago who tried to tell me otherwise , I have this to say: "You were wrong, and this book proves it!"

Over the years, I've worked in a number of different data centers, and in that time I've had the opportunity to talk to many of Sun's customers about their centers and take tours through them. What I repeatedly found, with very few exceptions, was that there was no overall design methodology used when planning these centers. If there was a methodology, it usually came out of overcoming one or two problems that had bitten these people in previous data centers. Sometimes the problem areas were so over-designed that it forced other design areas to suffer.

Often, the people who designed the space had never worked in data center environments. They typically designed commercial spaces like offices and warehouses and they used one basic method or formula for the design criteria: watts per square foot . This method assumes that the equipment load across the entire space is uniform. In every data center I have seen, the equipment load has never been uniform. Add to this that all of the pieces that make up a data center (power, cooling, floor load, connectivity, etc.) are all interrelated and dependent on each other. It became very clear that this old method of watts per square foot was not an effective or efficient design method. A better method that could address these issues was needed.

When I started trying to create this new design methodology, I looked to other sources of design for information and inspiration, what Shakespeare would have probably referred to as muses. These run the gamut from classical antiquity to modern pop culture, and from artists and philosophers to fashion designers and punk rock musicians . At the beginning of every chapter in this book is a quote from one of these many muses. I hope that they can help provide you with similar inspiration, or better still, help you find your own muses.

So, just what does "Omne ignotum, pro magnifico" mean? It translates as "Everything unknown is taken for magnificent ." It means "Everything is commonplace by explanation." With information, reason, inspiration, and hard work, many things, including designing a data center, are understandable and doable.

So let's get started! Or, to borrow a phrase from my Southern California Skateboarder's Lexicon, "Let's get radical !"