Designing Data Centres

There are currently 26 providers and 52 data centres in Singapore. This includes 51 co-location facilities, 42 cloud nodes, 9 Internet exchanges, and 21 disaster recovery and business continuity (DRBC) sites. Data Centres are all around us, we likely drove past or walked past one every day without realising it. Movement of data is constantly happening around us in the air all the time and it is not something that is going to change and in fact has become such a daily feature in our lives that we don’t know what to do without it! So, the business of building data centres is here to stay and its growing fast. What do we do? As architects, we need to know these critical infrastructures better and be ready to be involved in the evolution of data centres! 

Outline

1. Brief Introduction to IDA’s portfolio in data centres

2. Wrapping our heads around data centres

· Data centres Tier Standards (Up time Institute)

· What are the key components in a data centre?

· What is their relationship to each other?

· Who’s in the consultancy team

3. What’s important, where do you start?

· What is the objective or design brief about?

· Due Diligence Studies

4. Some key design considerations

· Planning Requirement – respond to the site please!

· Power & backup

· Data Hall layout

· Cooling Strategy

· Fire protection

· Security/vehicular &pedestrian movements

· Phases/future fit-outs

5. So, what value are Architects in the design of data centres? Things (maybe) to come in the future.