Building your own datacentre

This is the follow on from So you want to set up your own hosting company?.

Building your own Datacentre

So you have reached the top, you’ve exhausted all of your options, now you think it’s time to take on the big boys. This is where it really becomes serious, once you do go down this path there is no turning back.

You have 2 options here when considering setting up your datacentre, you can find a plot of land and get the relevant permissions to build on the land or you can find an existing warehouse and again gaining the permissions to convert an existing warehouse.

Before you even get to the “breaking the turf” ceremony or you wield the hammer in anger, there is a lot of planning to go into your datacentre.

At the planning stage you have to consider where you want to build the datacente if you are going from scratch or find a warehouse that can be easily converted without any hidden costs.

Planning the infrastructure

I would say get all of your infrastructure plans drafted up before looking for a suitable place, that way, your plans can be altered to suit what can fit on the plot of land or what can be placed into an existing building.

When planning the infrastructure you have to take into account the following:

Power
Networking
Bandwidth Providers (multiple in case one provider goes down for maintenance or cables get cut)
Air conditioning/cooling
Fire suppressant systems
Security Systems
NOC (Network Operations Centre)

Staff costs.

All should be planned with future expansion in mind, no point in putting in a system only to discover it is going to be a nightmare to upgrade when more capacity is needed. Also remember redundancy, all systems need a backup in case of an emergency.

Always consult experts for all of the above, never cut costs when setting up your own datacentre, it will come back to bite you when you least expect it.

Bottom line it is very expensive to set up your own datacentre, so really think about it if you do want to go down this route.

[Chase]

Nice beginners guide

[David]

Nice read and a great guide for beginners; thanks!

[Paul M]

So .... how many of you are planning to build a data centre

[MjrNuT]

umm, yeah, what he ^ said.

[Azhria Lilu]

It's on my to-do list for this afternoon

[Blind Bandit]

If I needed that much space. I would just do co location. Or rent out a suite in a telecom hotel.

[cheat-master30]

I don't think many people are going to go quite this far, but nice article anyway. A bit lacking in detail though in my opinion.

[Wizzard]

“ Originally Posted by cheat-master30 ”

I don't think many people are going to go quite this far, but nice article anyway. A bit lacking in detail though in my opinion.

It depends if you want to sit through a multipost article

[Steve M]

“ Originally Posted by Wizzard ”

It depends if you want to sit through a multipost article

Do it man, throw up a multi part article in regards to this topic. I'm sure it will help a lot of peeps out who are thinking of running their own data center.