Data centers typically occupy office or industrial space. However, their needs are very different from most typical office and industrial uses. As such, the site selection criteria that you'll keep in mind when looking for a data center are also unique. Below are the top four things keep in mind:
1. Power Costs
If you picture a data center in your mind's eye, you'll see rows and rows of racks filled with multiple computers but relatively few people. Data centers don't burn staff hours and don't turn out products. They use power to move information. This is one of the reasons that companies that locate their offices in Silicon Valley end up putting their data centers in the middle of the country or in seemingly less desirable markets. Power is frequently cheaper there. For those who include environmental impact in their site selection criteria, many states with inexpensive power also have green power from ample winds, high insolation rates (for solar power) or from hydroelectric generation. A stable grid is also particularly important (even though data centers should have backup generators).
2. Data Infrastructure
The data that data centers generate ultimately needs to flow in and out of the facility. As such, facilities that are connected to multiple high speed Internet backbones should rise to the top in your site selection process. In addition to high levels of bandwidth, look for locations that offer low latency connections where the data transfer not only happens quickly (bandwidth) but starts and stops quickly (latency). Connections to multiple redundant backbones from different providers also means that if one connection goes down, your data center will remain connected and available to your end users.
3. Physical Configuration and Security
While few companies want poorly configured and unsafe facilities, getting configuration and security right is particularly important for a data center. The property should be set up to insure that your servers can receive adequate cooling and that they are protected from being physically damaged. In addition, data centers should be hardened against natural disasters, weather, and physical attacks on the building (as opposed to on the computers therein). After all, if your data center is perfect in every way, but lies in the path of hurricanes and cannot survive them, it isn't suitable. The most secure data centers even include places for key employees to hunker down and stay in the data center during emergencies so that your operations can stay up, no matter what.
4. Everything Else
Finally, all of the other site selection criteria matter, too. A data center that your employees can't get to isn't as good as one that is more accessible. One that exposes you to unreasonably high taxes is also undesirable. While many data centers are unmarked buildings, your company could choose to put a sign on it to gain additional exposure. However, all of those criteria -- that can be very important in traditional site selection processes -- are much less important than the other three key criteria identified here.
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