THE ART OF THE DATA CENTER Goes Inside Computing Environments

Today, data centers are the beating hearts of the companies they serve. Data centers process billions of Internet transactions every day. It's therefore critical for companies and IT organizations to understand the state-of-the-art in data center design. Narrow aspects - such as cooling, wiring, or power usage - are often the subject of technical documents. But it's rare to find a holistic view of how a great data center was designed - until now. In The Art of the Data Center, Cisco's Douglas Alger takes you behind the scenes at eighteen of the world's most innovative data centers. Through interviews with their designers, Alger reveals why key decisions were made, and shows how construction and other challenges were overcome. He goes behind the scenes with pioneering companies like Cisco, eBay, Facebook, and Yahoo! presenting design lessons that can be applied in widely diverse environments.

Readers will encounter amazing data centers like these:
A data center built into a 1920s chapel
A data center built in an underground military bunker, with artificial daylight, manmade waterfalls, and submarine engines providing standby power
A data center inspired by a chicken coop
The world's first all solar data center

Alger interviews each Data Center’s creators, illuminating their key decisions and lessons learned, and revealing their handiwork through stunning full-color photography.
You’ll tour Data Centers built into a former nuclear bunker—and a former chapel. You’ll encounter a Data Center powered entirely by solar energy, and one inspired by a chicken coop. And you’ll discover the state-of- the-art solutions their designers have found for everything from cooling to cabling to energy efficiency. These Data Centers are among the 21st century’s greatest unknown human achievements. Whether you choose to appreciate their technology, their aesthetics, or both, they will inspire you.

Data center professionals directly involved in planning, design, or operations will find this book remarkably useful - and a much broader audience of IT executives and practitioners will find it utterly fascinating.

Aboout the Author:
Douglas Alger is a newspaper reporter turned “Data Center guy” who has worked for more than 15 years in Data Center operations, physical design, architecture, project management and related areas. He hosts the Data Center Deconstructed blog, and is author of Build the Best Data Center Facility for Your Business and Grow a Greener Data Center. Alger has managed about 100 major Data Center projects, from all-new construction to substantially retrofitting existing facilities. He also helped write the Cisco Global Data Center Strategy and Data Center Design Guidelines documents, which define the performance requirements and design elements for Cisco computing environments.

He was previously a writer and editor in the News and Publications office of Syracuse University, and a full-time stringer for the Los Angeles Times, where he served on the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered California’s Northridge earthquake. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Jose State University. What happens in Data Centers shapes every minute of your life. Yet Data Centers typically fly under the radar: either envisioned as nondescript, generic buildings, or—more often—not imagined at all. To design and construct a modern Data Center, however, is to do something truly amazing. Data Centers must process breathtaking amounts of information at unimaginable speed. They must always work, in the face of obstacles ranging from natural disasters to equipment failure, tight budgets to fast-changing business environments. The best Data Centers meet all of these challenges with remarkable technical innovation and surprising elegance. Some even achieve beauty.