What matters in Data centre design ? This article does not cover the individual HOAI planning stages or common methods such as the quality triangle. We focus on the essential topics for the future!
Every Data Center is individual and so the planning must also be individual. With today's requirements, it is not advisable for serious planning to simply duplicate finished planning services from previous projects.
We therefore recommend making sure that your individual requirements and framework parameters are all met and sufficiently considered during planning.
Legal requirements, energy efficiency and operating conditions should be considered early in data centre planning. The statutory obligations applicable to a project are assessed against its location, operator and facility. The following points are particularly relevant when comparing technical options:
Efficiency targets and measurement boundaries: a PUE comparison requires consistent assessment periods, IT utilisation and system boundaries. A planned target value must be distinguished from a measured annual value. Project-specific requirements are established before the design is developed.
Energy supply: electricity procurement, on-site generation, redundancy and supporting evidence are considered together. Legal obligations and technical objectives are assessed for the specific facility.
- Water is an important resource for data centres. Sufficient supplies are becoming harder to secure in both urban and rural areas. Adiabatic cooling is a common element of cooling strategies because of its energy efficiency. It uses the evaporation of large quantities of water to achieve a cooling effect. Forward-looking data centre planning takes water scarcity into account and examines the advantages and disadvantages of different cooling approaches.
- Consideration of IT hardware (server structure). Often Data Center planners consider a Data Center as a black box. The question of IT connectivity is raised in every kick-off meeting, but very rarely questioned. Holistic planning looks not only at the pure infrastructure, but also at the components that need to be supplied. Often, by simply replacing the server hardware, IT performance can be reduced and thus systems can be dimensioned smaller and more efficiently. In most cases, the discarded server hardware can be repaired or reconditioned. The hardware recycled in this way thus undergoes ecological reuse (Second Life).
- Every Data Center converts the supplied electrical energy 1:1 into thermal energy. When planning the Data Center, ensure that the rate of reuse of this heat energy is as high as possible. Releasing this waste heat unused into the atmosphere is neither a particularly progressive nor sustainable planning approach. When choosing a location, make sure that the heat can be fed into a district heating network, for example, or use other options to use the waste heat ecologically.
- Scalable and modular infrastructure. A Data Center can only be operated efficiently if all system components are optimally utilized. Already during the planning phase, attention must be paid to a sensible selection of components and their dimensioning.
Legal and technical context updated on 8 September 2026.
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