Welcome to “Data Center Infrastructure Design - An Introduction”…where we take a focused look at data center design from an infrastructure point of view.

We define data center infrastructure as the spaces, pathways, racks, cabinets, cabling, power, grounding, and cooling – all the elements that must be put in place to reliably support many network devices so they can operate without interruption.

Data centers come in many forms and sizes, such as hyperscale, cloud, colocation, enterprise, and edge. Our focus is on the enterprise facility, which can be in a dedicated stand-alone structure or in a space within an office building, hospital, airport, sports stadium, or university campus, to name a few examples.

A data center serves as the central repository of an organization’s intellectual property. It requires state-of-the-art security, fire suppression, environmental controls, power distribution, network equipment, and tools for continuous monitoring and maintenance.

The network cabling system is a critical component of reliable communications within the data center and with sites and networks outside the data center.

This is an introductory course, intended to give you a detailed overview of standards-based guidelines and recommendations for data center infrastructure design.

We know that your time is valuable. Our objective is to provide you with the maximum amount of information in a minimum amount of time, so we have tightly scripted each of the lectures. We hope you find the contents useful and interesting.

Cory and Steve