Practical Options for Deploying IT Equipment in Small Server Rooms and Branch Offices

by Victor Avelar

Executive Summary

Small server rooms and branch offices are typically unorganized, unsecure, hot, unmonitored, and space constrained. These conditions can lead to system downtime or, at the very least, lead to “close calls” that get management’s attention. Practical experience with these problems reveals a short list of effective methods to improve the availability of IT operations within small server rooms and branch offices. This paper discusses making realistic improvements to power, cooling, racks, physical security, monitoring, and lighting. The focus of this paper is on small server rooms and branch offices with up to 10kW of IT load.

Conclusion

Our experience with thousands of data rooms of small businesses and branch offices reveals that most of them are unorganized, unsecure, hot, unmonitored, and space constrained. It is also clear that these situations often result in avoidable downtime and inconvenience. IT managers in these environments have little time to research physical infrastructure best practices. This paper is written to comprehend this time constraint and summarizes the most practical improvements to power, cooling, racks, physical security, monitoring, and lighting for small data rooms and branch offices with up to 10kW of IT load.

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