Practical Options for Deploying Small Server Rooms and Micro Data Centers

Small server rooms and branch offices are typically unorganized, unsecure, hot, unmonitored, and space-constrained. These conditions can lead to system downtime or, at the very least, lead to “close calls” that get management’s attention. Practical experience with these problems reveals a short list of effective methods to improve the availability of IT operations within small server rooms and branch offices. This paper discusses making realistic improvements to power, cooling, racks, physical security, monitoring, and lighting. The focus of this paper is on small server rooms and branch offices with up to 10kW of IT load.