Recently Chatsworth Products strengthened its data center awareness and design knowledge by sending several employees to advanced data center design training.
Members of our technical support team, as well as a technical writer, and an application engineer attended the Datacenter Dynamics Certified Data Center Design Course and are now recognized on an international level with a Certified Data Center Design (CDCD™) qualification through DatacenterDynamics.
This course covered TIA-942 as well as international standards that apply to the data center. The course was three days and covered everything from site selection to the commissioning of a data center. It offered a lot of information about the following topics:
- Design criteria
- Site selection and building considerations
- Tier levels
- Networks
- Cabinets and racks and as well as the layouts
- Raised floors
- Cable distribution and containment
- Copper and fiber media
- Grounding and bonding
- Power
- A/C
- Fire protection
- Building management systems
- Commissioning
The training sessions had a wide mix of attendees including data center managers, facilities managers, and design teams - all of whom had something valuable to add. We also covered the Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy Efficiency that is currently being implemented by the European Commission. For those of you interested in the international development of data centers, I strongly suggest you read this if you have not already done so. There is also a document of best practices for the EU Code of Conduct on Data Centers that provides a great deal of good ideas and common sense.
Why This Training is Important
While this qualification is important to us, it is just as important to you, because when designing a data center, you want a knowledgeable team on your side and one that understands the challenges you face designing and updating your data center. We all know that no two data centers are alike, with each offering a different challenge, but working with our team, we can arrive at some good solutions that will make your design better, offer fewer hurdles and challenges. We will also work with you to insure best practices are at least considered.
CPI Employees who graduated from the course include:
- David Knapp, Technical Writer
- Tom Bradley, Technical Support Supervisor
- Lonnie Long, Technical Support Representative
- John Trevino, Technical Support Representative
- Guy Lewandowski, Technical Support Representative
- Fernando Reyna, Technical Applications Engineer
- Ian Cathcart, Technical Support Manager, United Kingdom (graduated June 2009)
Additionally, David Sloma, Custom Product/Projects Supervisor, recently attended DC110 Data Center Design Best Practices conducted by BICSI during April. Sloma, myself and several other employees are also RCDD certified.
We will be discussing some topics from this course in the future that will stimulate a thought or two, and even some that you may already be practicing. We welcome conversations or comments, because through communication we all learn something new and make improvements.Tom Bradley, Technical Support Supervisor