If you work as a network architect for long enough, sooner or later you may be asked to help design a new data center network. Although this probably doesn't sound like a big deal at first, I can assure you that it is not a task to be taken lightly. The way your data center is designed can have a direct impact on limiting the scale, topology, or even functionality of your network. Physical facilities considerations of data center design, such as power consumption and heating and cooling, will have a strong impact on your network design.

Electrical capacity and the data center network

Your data center network cannot function without electricity. When you combine that with the fact that electrical power is one of a data center's primary ongoing expenses, it makes sense to take a good look at the data center's electrical capacity up front.

Many years ago, I was doing some after-hours consulting projects. I received a phone call one day from a small company that had recently moved into a new building. They were having some problems with a new UPS they were using.

I had never been to the company's new facility, and I hadn't been involved in the move, so I didn't really know what to expect. When I got there, the server room looked something like the scene from the movie "A Christmas Story" where the father had a zillion plugs feeding into a single outlet. Whoever had set up the room had daisy-chained a bunch of power strips. This meant that every