Seminar: Data Centre Design (In Association with the IET)

The IET Teacher Building : Glasgow Data centres are the engine rooms of today’s economy and like any other industrial process they consume vast amounts of energy, judged to be between 2 and 3% of European electricity production according to the EU.

Several bodies and organisations have set out to define the fundamental design and operational principles of data centres, these are:

• USA - TIA 942 - Design standard for data centres.
• USA - The Uptime Institute (TUI) - A ‘tiering method’ to describe data centre redundancy and resilience.
• Germany - BITKOM - A data centre availability rationale.
• EU - The EU Code of Conduct on data centres and associated Best Practice document.

Power, HVAC and data cabling account for 70% of construction costs whereas electricity accounts for over 50% of the running costs. The cost of electricity plus various legal requirements to cut carbon emissions are a major incentive to design the data centre to be as energy efficient as possible. The British Government has stated that it will be implementing the EU Code of Conduct wherever it can and for the private sector it will become a major marketing asset to be perceived to have EU ‘green credentials’.
This seminar from the IET and sponsored by Connectix, the UK’s largest supplier of data cabling, will focus on four major elements in this one-day presentation.
Part 1 - The Data Centre Environment:

• Definitions of a data centre.
• Applicable standards and legislation.
• The low carbon-high efficiency imperative.
• The EU Code of Conduct.
• TIA 942.
• The implications of N, N+1 and 2N designs.

Part 2 - Cooling the Data Centre; The Biggest Energy Overhead:

• Basics of cooling technology.
• DX and central chiller systems.
• HVAC overheads.
• The hot aisle-cold aisle concept.
• Air versus water cooling.
• Simple energy saving techniques.
• Advanced air economiser systems.

Part 3 - Power:

• Data centre efficiency metrics.
• The effect of N+1 and Tiers 1-4 on designs, and costs.
• Low energy UPS options.
• High quality grounding and earthing for IT installations.

Part 4 - Cabling:

• New BS EN 50174 requirements on power and data separation.
• Fire requirements for data cabling.
• Defining categories of copper cable and optical fibre for 1-100 Gb/s LANs.
• The impact of new technologies such as preterminated cabling.
• What happens when you don’t have a proper structured cabling system.

The speaker is Barry Elliott who has over 20 years experience in the communications industry and has spent the last four years as a specialist in data centre design.
Qualifications:

• BSc (Hons) University of Kent, Communications Engineering.
• BICSI RCDD, Registered Communications Designer.
• MBA Henley Management College.
• CIBSE Low Carbon Consultant.
• CIBSE Chartered Building Services Engineer.
• IET Chartered Electrical Engineer.

Date: 2 July 2009
Timings for the Day
09:30 - 10:00 Registration
10:00 - 10:15 Opening address
10:15 - 11:15 Part 1
11:15 - 11:30 Tea/Coffee
11:30 - 12:30 Part 2
12:30 - 13:15 Lunch
13:15 - 14:15 Part 3
14:15 - 14:30 Tea/Coffee
14:30 - 15:30 Part 4

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS SEMINAR