On Wed, 09 February 2000, foo wrote:

I'm wondering if there are any mailing lists or other resources concerning building, designing, and maintaining Data Centers.

Try datacenter@shorty.com (majordomo@shorty.com)

I've found some vaguely helpful resources from netsearches, but so far I've been pretty disappointed with the amount and level of the available information. Are there any books? Any respected "authorities"? Is everyone learning as they go, or are all of the new Internet DC's being built by old-school mainframe/datawarehouse types?

When doing research on the web, only bits and pieces of information from before 1992 are on the web. So you need to look other places in addition to the web. A great source I've found is going to a local public or university library and asking for the government documents section (GOVDOC). Their documents cover many aspects of designing, building and maintaining data centers and lots of other things. However you may have to think creatively to find the information. For example, if you want to know what type of exterior lights to use, think of Illumination Considerations For Nuclear Storage Areas. You will want to scan at least the FIPS index for computer topics. Be prepared to use a microfilm and microfiche reader. Remember there are assumptions in the documents. In particular older data center design existed in a world of batch processes. Computers were extremely expensive, and brief service interruptions were acceptable. In today's world computers are cheap, and interruption of service is very expensive. This affects core elements of the design. Other sources include vendors such as IBM, Liebert, Telcordia and groups like ANSI, ASHRAE, BICSI, IEEE, NFPA, UL, etc, etc, etc. Again be careful about understanding the assumptions. Handing a set of old standards to an architect and saying build me a data center is the worst thing you can do. You will get exactly what you asked for, but not what you wanted.