Building A Data Center: A Construction Minefield; Critical construction projects require special expertise. (Power Quality and Reliability).(Brief Article)

While every design and construction project presents its own unique set of problems, few can rival the myriad of complex challenges involved in the construction of a modern data center, data farm, or telecom hotel. Although differing greatly in square footage and configuration, all are essentially host sites for some of the largest and most powerful computer servers in the world. Many are web-hosting facilities hatched to serve the explosive growth of the Internet. Some are in downtown high-rise office buildings, others in formerly abandoned warehouses near rail yards. Still others are in suburban office parks. But there's a reason for each location, just one of the many variables in the complex issues to balance when planning a data farm.

"While the growth of the last few years has slowed, e-commerce is still growing. During the Internet boom everyone wanted a piece of the action, and you couldn't even find the building materials or hardware you needed," said Bruce W. Bleser, director of Mission Critical Facilities for Black & Veatch, a Kansas City, MO,-based engineering and construction firm with over 25 years of data center experience. Bleser notes there are three main types of data centers: POPs, or point of presence, which provide access to fiber; Internet data centers (IDCs) like Sprint ElSolutions, Exodus, Genuity, and several others that lease rack space or provide fully managed services; and, third, enterprise facilities for huge collections of data by customer-owners such as Wal-Mart or insurance companies. All however, share similar requirements.

Power and Fiber

"We have helped to build data centers in almost every type of building you can imagine," said Julio Herdocia, a principle at MTH Engineers in Santa Clara, CA, "and it can be a real challenge. But there are always two main ingredients, power and fiber." Data centers consume huge amounts of power, sometimes so much they aren't welcome in some communities. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a new 45,000-square-foot data center planned in Sunnyvale, CA, by Qwest Communications wouldn't receive power until 2002 by the local utility, PG&E. "They are using enormous amounts of power," said Keith Reed of PG&E. In just one year the utility received requests from data centers for enough power equal to that used by 1.2 million families.

The Yankee consulting group predicted power supplies in areas like Santa Clara would have to double in three years, just to supply power for data centers. Considering the power situation in California, that isn't likely to happen. Some local utilities are making farms pay a surcharge for their high power needs. Bob Royer of Seattle City Light told The Wall Street Journal, "We don't want the old economy paying for the effects of the new economy." Data centers must pay additional costs to locate in his town.

Critical Power

Just the availability of sufficient power for a data center begs the bigger question: what is the quality of that power and is it reliable? "This is the critical question," says MTH's Herdocia. "Data centers contract with their customers for high rates of reliability-they can't go down. We reference the six 9s of reliability or 99.9999% of uptime. That means over a year's time, the data center will experience only 30 seconds of downtime per year. At this point you are talking a lot of redundancy, with battery back ups, then parallel generators. It gets to a point where you are designing a system that is so complicated it is no longer economically feasible," Herdocia said.