The room is part of the machine.
Most sites in our range are not greenfield. There is a room, a distribution board, a chilled water riser or none at all, a ceiling height, a floor loading, and a route from the loading bay that someone has to get a rack down. Design begins with the survey, not the catalogue.
The EN 50600 series is the European standard for data centre facilities and infrastructures, covering power distribution, environmental control, physical security, management and energy efficiency[src]. It is increasingly written into public procurement, and it is the frame we design against whether or not a given project is tendered.
Rack elevation
Unit-by-unit layout, cable management, blanking, weight distribution and service access.
Power topology
Supply, redundancy scheme, distribution and per-outlet metering, sized to the site's available capacity.
Cooling loop
Primary and secondary circuits, coolant distribution, and the interface where heat can be taken away for reuse.
Network
Fabric, uplinks, out-of-band management and the boundary between our equipment and the site's.
Retrofit
Integration into existing racks and rooms, including partial-row and shared-facility deployments.
Commissioning
Acceptance under load, instrumentation verified against the reporting schema before handover.
| Rack elevation and layout | Drawing set |
|---|---|
| Single-line power diagram | Drawing set |
| Cooling loop schematic | Drawing set |
| Physical envelope | Weight, dimensions, floor loading |
| Thermal envelope | Heat rejection, airflow, operating rangeEnvironmental class per ASHRAE TC9.9 |
| Electrical envelope | Redundant and non-redundant load, inrush, harmonics |
| Acoustic | Sound power under load |
| Commissioning record | Acceptance under load |
Issued with the design. A facilities engineer needs weight, heat rejection, airflow and operating range to say yes, and should not have to ask twice for them.