The Guide to Rack Integration and Streamlined Datacenter Deployment

Datacenter infrastructure is the foundation of your business.

It powers your ability to deliver incredible user experiences and value.

Deploying that infrastructure—especially at scale—can be a complex and detailed process to manage internally, requiring a significant investment in building out your in-house capabilities.

For a sense of just how complicated the deployment process can be, consider the four common steps necessary to successfully bring new hardware online in a timely fashion:

1. Design

This first phase involves a laundry list of detailed engineering services like:

• Power mapping
• Cooling
• Capacity planning
• Network design
• Structured and unstructured cabling design
• Density and elevation planning
• Serviceability planning
• Vendor selection

Since the design phase is essentially charting out the immediate future of your infrastructure, it’s important to thoroughly consider each element in the design process. Your goal should be a design that meets your scaling needs without overspend.

2. Logistics

In many ways, the logistics phase of implementing a new infrastructure is similar to conducting an orchestra. To accelerate your time to market—and get the most out of your investment—you need to ensure the steps of procurement, vendor triage, supply chain management, and project management are working in concert.

Delays routinely happen, especially given the outsized ripple effect a single missed shipment date can have on your overall schedule. Weather events, supply shortages, even traffic—each can slow you down and lead to expensive delays.

Because of this, a certain level of elasticity needs to be built into the planning process. Having components waiting in storage for other parts to arrive is a recipe for unnecessary costs.

3. Testing

Before putting new infrastructure into production, it’s critical to take every component for a test drive. That means assembling a proof-of-concept, stress testing hardware, and determining which QA/QC workflows can be automated.

Through these and other tests, you can build out documentation and put in place a report generation process to effectively monitor your infrastructure—and diagnose potential problems—once it’s in the wild.

4. Deployment

The heavy lifting of the new infrastructure process, deployment is about more than simply shipping new hardware to a location. At a granular level, deployment involves steps like datacenter and co-location triage, pre-deployment reviews of sites and site validation procedures, onsite planning, and general last-mile deployment deliverables.

Since the overarching goal of deployment is to bring new hardware online as quickly as possible, that old axiom “measure twice and cut once” is definitely the way to go. You don’t want surprises once your new hardware hits its location.