As the saying goes, the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. On a data center project, some tailored software can often point things in the right direction. Novices and grizzled veterans alike would be wise to peruse some of these options for maximizing their new construction and retrofit results.
My data center design experience is old enough to drive this year. For 16 years I have been lucky enough to work almost exclusively on mission critical projects, and by now I have a pretty good track record and syllabus of lessons learned. But I still get a shiver when I recall how lost I was when I started.
On my first data center project, for an entire meeting I nodded along even as I wondered what a “crack” was; only to find out soon after it was a CRAC unit — something of particular interest to the HVAC designer, one would think. For reasons unbeknownst to me, the letter “N” was thrown around a lot. And “uptime” sounded like an especially cheery goal for a mechanical system although I wasn’t exactly sure what it entailed.