Facilitating Technology

When Gerry Hansen helped launch N’compass Solutions, Inc., a Minneapolis technology consulting company, he saw it as a chance to marry two of his loves: architecture and technology. A degreed architect who worked for seven years with the Cuningham Group, a local architecture firm, Hansen was fascinated by technology but far from an expert when he decided to join a technology consulting group. There he discovered he could bring together teams of architects, engineers, and client representatives in building technology facilities.

That experience proved a stepping stone to N’compass, where Hansen, now executive vice president of operations, has been instrumental in the construction of data centers for Best Buy, Lawson Software, St. Jude Medical, and the Guthrie Theater. Designing today’s data centers requires the skill of a plate-spinner in capacity planning, knowledge of evolving, high-density server technology, and diplomacy for negotiating between information technology and facilities management groups. It’s a multi-faceted challenge that Hansen appears to relish.

Design Challenges Grow

Hansen and his consulting teams must consider more than just raw computing power or where to run fiber optic pipes when designing data centers. New high-density technologies such as blade servers—essentially a server chassis that stores multiple, thin, electronic circuit boards and allows for greater processing power in less space—and the practice of server virtualization, which enables multiple operating systems to run on a single computer, have dramatically changed the power and cooling demands of data centers, with ramifications for building design.

While IT professionals usually have a firm idea of the technology needed in data centers, they’re not practiced in how to communicate those needs in ways architects can readily grasp. That’s where Hansen and his design teams come in. “There are times when technology experts have difficulty talking in facilities or construction language,” Hansen says. “They struggle to take their requirements and put them into documentation that architects and electrical engineers can use to help construct a data center. That’s where we help.”

Decisions made in data center design carry high stakes. Technology facilities are among the most expensive to build on a dollars-per-square-foot basis owing to the mechanical and electrical infrastructure needed to run them and keep data safe. In addition, power and cooling costs are a significant expense, and Gartner, Inc., a Connecticut-based technology research firm, estimates that anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of energy in most data centers is wasted, making more efficient use of those utilities imperative.