Objectives

1) Demonstrate your understanding of the calculations needed to determine the power required
for a piece of equipment
2) Demonstrate your understanding of the calculations needed to determine the power required
for a rack of equipment
3) Demonstrate your understanding of how to connect equipment to the PDUs in a rack.
4) Demonstrate your understanding of how to cable equipment to rack network equipment.
5) Demonstrate your understanding of the calculations needed to determine the cooling required
for a piece of equipment
6) Demonstrate your understanding of the calculations needed to determine the cooling required
for a rack of equipment
7) Demonstrate your understanding of how to install equipment in racks.
8) Demonstrate your understanding of server cabling requirements and topology

Submission requirements
a) There are 2 submissions required for this Project. The first is a professional document that is
intended for both management and technical deployment teams to use as a summary of your
solution. It should also include the data points necessary for the sites facility team to access the
power and cooling needs of your equipment.
b) The second submission is a completed racking template that will be used by the “rack and
stack” install team. This template with be the design they will follow to properly rack and cable
your equipment.
NOTE: You can use Microsoft Word or PowerPoint to prepare your project summary
submission, but it must be saved as a pdf for uploading. For the Rack Template, upload the MS
Excel file.

Background information
Your organization has decided to move all of the equipment it currently has in several small data
center’s location at various organization offices around the country to a colocation data center
near the offices where the IT department is location. This data center has an Uptime Institute
Tier 4 certifications.
There are a number of reasons for making this move:
a) Most of the organization’s offices need additional space for staff.
 b) The small data centers are running out of capacity for new equipment (physical space,
cooling and/or power).
c) Achieve economies of scale to reduce IT operating and capital costs (in the future).
d) Add redundancy and uptime capabilities that currently do not exists.

Senior management have decided that they do not want to incur the cost of buying any new IT
equipment that is not essential to the move. This means that the only new equipment will be 2
network switches to be used to connect the individual rack switches to the redundant network
connections in the data center. Senior management have agreed, in writing, that downtime is
acceptable as each office’s equipment is moved to accommodate this restriction on new
equipment purchases.

The 2 new network switches each have dual power supplies with a current of 2.0A at 240V. Each
switch requires 2U of space in a rack. Identify these switches are Core-switch-1 and Core-
switch-2.
A consolidated list of the existing equipment that is to be moved into the colocation data center
is:
a) One hundred 1U servers with redundant power supplies requiring 2A each at 240V. Identify
these servers as Server-1 through Server-100. Each server required 2 cat5 for production, 1 cat5
for management, 1 cat5 for backup.
b) Twenty 1U network switches with redundant power supplies requiring 1.5A each at 240V. All
switches have 48 network ports plus 2 x 10Gb SFP+ Uplink ports. Identify these switches as
Switch-1 through Switch-20.
c) Twenty 2U servers with redundant power supplies requiring 3A each at 240V. Identify these
servers as Server-101 through Server-120. Each server required 2 cat5 for production, 1 cat5 for
management, 1 cat5 for backup.
d) Six 10U blade server chassis units with 6 power supplies (3 redundant pairs). Each power
supply requires 12A at 240V. Each chassis has 33 network ports Identify these units as Chassis-1
through Chassis-6. Of the 33 network ports 1 cat5 is for management and 2 are for backup. (30
for production 15x15)
e) Eight 6U storage arrays each with 4 power supplies (2 redundant pairs) each power supply
requires 8A at 240V. Each storage array has 4 network ports. 2 for production, 1 for backup and
1 for management. In addition, each SAN requires 8 fiber connections. Identify these units as
Storage-1 through Storage-8.
The colocation data center is providing all of the racks already provisioned with PDUs as
follows:
a) Each rack is a standard 19 inch 4-post closed rack, 42U high and includes
a. a full set of blank panels
b. Internal vertical cable management on both sides at the rear of the rack.
b) Each rack receives its power from the data center’s 2 redundant power sources provided by a
bus bar located under the raised floor.
c) Cooling is provided from the outside aisle through perforated raised floor tiles.
d) Each rack should have horizontal cable management were appropriate.
e) Each rack will have a 2u 48 port patch panel.
a. backup and server management network (iDRAC) switches are already provisioned at
the site using EoR Topology
b. the backup network is terminated using purple RJ45 keystone jacks
c. the management network is terminated using red RJ45 keystone jacks
f) Each rack has a Dell 2161 KVM (16 port) switch installed at position 21u.
g) All power is 240V AC.
h) In a rack each power source has the following 1u horizontal mount PDUs:
a. One 50A PDU with 4 receptacles
b. Two 20A PDUs with 8 receptacles each
This gives a total of 6 PDUs per rack (3 on each power source)

What you are to do

1) Create a solution proposal document. This document must contain your own understanding of
the problem, requirements and an explanation, in words, of your solution.

2) Determine and report the total power available on each of the redundant power sources per
rack. Since all of the racks have the same power supplied to them, you only have to calculate and
report this information once.
3) Determine and report the power required by each piece of equipment your organization will
be installing in the data center. Since there are multiple pieces of equipment with the same power
requirement, you only need to calculate and report this value once for each type of equipment
4) Determine and report the total power required by all of your equipment.

5) Determine and document the cooling requirements for each piece of equipment your
organization is installing in the data center. Since there are multiple pieces of equipment with the
same cooling requirement, you only need to calculate and report this value once for each type of
equipment.
6) Determine and report the total cooling requirement for your organization’s equipment

7) Create rack diagrams for each rack that you populate with equipment. These diagrams need to
include the equipment, PDUs, cable management units and blank panels. All equipment must be
labeled with its name (as given in the Background Information section above). Do not attempt to
show any cable routing or connections within each rack, this will make the diagrams to
complicated.
8) Determine and report the number of racks that will be required to install all of the equipment
and the total power required per rack.
In order to do this, you will need to:
a. create a rack diagram
b. assign individual pieces of equipment to racks. Implement racking rules where required.
c. keep a running total of the power used per PDU or remaining PDU power.
d. keep track of which piece of equipment is plugged into which PDU.
e. keep a running total of the number of receptacles used in each PDU.
f. keep a per rack port density count per switch.
g. keep a per rack port density count per patch panel
 HINT: Remember each PDU can only deliver a limited amount of power and that each PDU has
a specific number of receptacles available.
HINT: The rack template you are given tracks most of these items needed automatically as long
as the specifications tab is populated with the correct data.
IMPORTANT: The power cables for a piece of equipment must be plugged into PDUs in the
same rack as the piece of equipment is installed

Word template for report:

Excel template worksheet: “screenshot of two pages”

Cheat template: