How to build a small Data Center, from scratch

Data Center Article 1.

So I am now trying to build a Data Center that is functional, but not an ugly monster like those in Northern Virginia.

Step One is to reuse an existing building, so I'm not starting a "greenfield build".

There are lots of buildings around that are kinda just basically warehouses, or at least warehouse-like in that they are big empty boxes. Most town of any size have buildings that are empty and are the right minimum size (which I would say is about 8000 sq ft, although 5000 would work too. Anything smaller is probably too expensive to rent.

Step Two is to make sure that building has adequate power. I'm aiming towards about 10 KW per rack, which means NOT doing big AI. If a building has 2-5 megawatts present, or available, that's adequate for a small space.

Step Three is to worry about cooling--are you going to need anything special? For 2-3 MW, probably not. You'll want more than is present in the building unless it was a cold storage building, I would figure on one megawatt of cooling for 3 megawatts of computing.

Step Four is that you need a decision about what software services you are supporting

Step Five is you need a rack design

Step Six is you need a network design

From 2010 through 2014 I was a user of what we now call "cloud services" except that didn't exist with that name at the time. But I needed what is now "rentable cpu", and some reasonable amount of data storage. So what I am trying to build to provide for others is what would have satisfied what I needed but couldn't get 10-15 years ago.

I will address all of those things in this series; some are of course harder than others.

I will also have some sidebar articles about details (such as the ProxMox-on-HP-Gen7).

I am primarily using ProxMox (https://proxmox.com/en/) for Virtual Machines; will probably have some Windows Server 2022 Data Center for folks who need Windows.

I am using NextCloud for casual data storage available to outside users. 

For large internal data storage availability, I am still investigating tools (things like CEPH, for example). I actually started to write my own version of this a few years ago, after having thought about it for a few years around 2011-2012; I ended up not needing it on that project, but that was because I got customer permission to buy a SAN.