IT Best Practices: Data Center Site Selection
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IT Best Practices: Intel IT and Corporate Services, working as a team, have identified a range of factors to consider when choosing a data center site. When Intel experiences growth that requires investment in data center facilities, the project team uses this set of factors to select a site that maximizes Intel’s return on investment.
These criteria help optimize construction and sustaining costs while meeting internal customers’ computing and services requirements. They also assist in choosing a site that can accommodate future needs and concerns.
When selecting a site, we consider three criteria to be the most important:
- Environmental conditions. The region’s climate and history of natural hazards.
- Wide area network. The availability and cost of fiber and communications infrastructure.
- Power. The availability and cost of electrical power infrastructure.
We also evaluate the following:
- Site-level criteria. The factors associated with land acquisition, proximity to threats and resources, and the construction environment.
- Socioeconomic, workforce, and governmental criteria. The factors associated with the social and economic stability of the region, the availability of a construction and sustaining workforce, and existing regulations, taxation, and incentives.
The perfect site does not exist, and examining all the relevant site-selection criteria is challenging. However, we have found that a well-defined site-selection process and a quantitative analysis of factors and tradeoffs can transform raw data into useful information and insight, enabling informed decision making. The result is a site choice that offers the most advantages, beginning at the preconstruction phase and continuing throughout the life of the data center.
For more information on Intel IT Best Practices, please visit intel.com/IT
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