8 Common Mistakes During Data Center Hardware Setup

Data center environments are becoming more complex, and mistakes in their design are, therefore, more costly and more difficult to correct, so avoiding errors has never been more important. 

The construction or expansion of a data center poses tremendous challenges. Small mistakes in setup can result in operational issues years down the road. As the centers become more compute-intensive and the thresholds for energy consumption become higher, the particulars of each operational decision become more and more crucial. Read on to find out more about the most common data center setup pitfalls, and how to avoid them.

Overlooked Power and Cooling Design

The consequences of a poorly planned power and cooling design can be disastrous for a data center. As data center rack power delivery becomes denser and high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) are utilized more frequently, power and cooling systems must be designed to keep up. Power delivery and thermal management systems must be designed in anticipation of the deployed hardware to prevent throttling and premature component failure.

Accurate load forecasting, along with estimates of heat output, are crucial to the planning process. Facilities with modular power distribution, coupled with modern liquid cooling systems, including direct-to-chip technologies, provide for easier load management. Installations with energy-efficient cooling will yield lower operational and utility costs. What’s more, these measures can be useful from the perspective of a data center’s environmental credentials, something that is of increasing concern to organizations throughout the planet which rely on such facilities.

Disregarded Rack Level Planning and the Cabling Pattern

Inadequate cell organization (the arrangement of racks or server enclosures) results in disordered cables and restricted airflow, increasing maintenance efforts and time. Prior to installation, rack elevation plans should be drawn containing power distribution units, cable management systems, and the depth or thickness of the equipment to prevent such disorganized cells.

Structured and planned cabling should, at the very least, become quasi-standard. Color coding, labeling, and routing documentation will keep maintenance and revision tasks prioritized, thereby enhancing efficiency and reducing the frustration that stems from routing the control cables. Confirming the compatibility of servers and switches in advance of installation will guarantee that each rack unit in the node and rack will be cohesive with the planned organization. 

Not Revalidating the Environmental Conditions

Setting up a data center with environmental sensors will enable real-time visibility into thermal conditions. Since humidity, ambient temperature, and the presence of airborne particulates can all impact data center efficiency, these should be fitted in aisles as well as within racks. 

Preventing hot spots within the data center that will inevitably degrade component efficiency over time can be done in numerous ways, including ensuring there is a consistent airflow direction, such as front-to-back, for instance. Proactive monitoring of the environmental conditions allows for the safe operating ranges to be maintained, regardless of the location or density of the equipment, something that can be particularly beneficial in edge or micro data centers.

Inadequately Managed Hardware Compatibility and Firmware Updates

The deployment of an integrated system will highlight poorly planned conjunction of various hardware, unmanaged firmware, and resultant system instability. Incompatible hardware components and unmanaged firmware will pose added complexity to performance and workload shifts. 

For a more centralized control of the hardware and firmware, testing the BIOS and network firmware versions is advisable. Checking these components, as well as the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), will typically help in troubleshooting pre-installation issues for a smooth data center hardware installation. If not, post-installation problems may occur, notably with interoperability across high performance clusters. Continuous firmware management guarantees evolving systems will remain reliable as upgrades are implemented.

Insufficient Planning of the Network Topology and Bandwidth

Whether a leaf-spine or fat-tree structure, data center topology that is poorly designed will create latency bottlenecks that are often costly to resolve down the line. Consequently, the design of the facility’s network infrastructure ought to have sufficient bandwidth taken into consideration from the start. Properly designed interconnects will support large-scale workloads that require real-time data exchanges in a compute cluster, something that is needed in many modernized data center configurations these days. Understanding communication requirements and traffic prioritization should be built into the design from the outset, not addressed after deployment.

Poor Data Center Security and Access Controls

During installation and subsequent maintenance, security is sometimes viewed as an inconvenient and costly aspect, despite the fact that it is an integral part of data center resilience. Incorporated into racks, security enclosures offer a sound level of control, especially when they’re augmented by secure access systems and automated logging. Access to sensitive hardware should always be controlled and monitored using security locks, access logs, and authentication controls. Such data security measures ensure that maintenance is always accountable and verifiable. 

Underestimated Testing and Burn-In Procedures

Failure to properly supervise and construct hardware sets can cause unplanned incidents where systems break down after production and deployment. Validation processes should include stress testing and redundancy verification without fail. What’s more, IT professionals need to simulate failure recovery in any business-critical setup. Such validation checks help data center managers to spot defective components early, while making sure that redundancy mechanisms operate as intended. 

Failing to Take Future Scalability Into Account

In the case of hardware setup, one of the most common errors is concentrating on the immediate situation while completely ignoring expansion. Every setup should include capacity forecasting for power, cooling, and floor space. Opting for modular racks, such as blade server configurations, for instance, means that on-demand, downtime-free growth becomes possible.

Modular infrastructure allows enterprises to grow their storage or compute resources in increments, and plan their investment to match demand. Adaptable architectures can tackle evolving workloads, but keep the data center efficient and ready for newly emerging technologies.

Conclusion

In a data center’s operational lifetime, setup errors will typically cause the biggest rework and most significant cost. Planning over multiple domains of power, cooling, network, and compute will ensure the hardware will perform as intended, and maintain reliability over the operational period. Modular design principles, along with validation, testing, and flexible setup, vastly improve the long-term management of the data center, while making ongoing management easier and more productive.

As the volume of work becomes more data-intensive, the need for accurate setup will continue to grow. Data centers that have utilized a disciplined deployment strategy will be in a more advantageous position to achieve consistently high performance computing, while upholding uninterrupted services.