Building your own data center?

Do you think it is possible to build a data center at home one server at a time. How would you start? or it's not recommended to do that?

This is a question that gets asked very often.

The only correct answer is NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Automatic fire suppression
Large redundant CRAC units for cooling
Large redundant power feeds
Large redundant backup generators
24/7/365 contracts with fuel companies for generator refueling (you'd be surprised how fast a generator can run through 1,000 gallons of diesel when its powering a DC!)
Multiple redundant Fiber optic transit lines (Not the same as the "fiber" lines your Telco may offer)
24/7/365 security systems with video surveillance & bio metric access.
Network Engineers on site 24/7/365
Data centers are purpose build facilities, built to withstand the elements, provide hot/cold isles, separate power & transit pathways into the building, etc. etc.

Anything less then this and your asking for trouble! This is not something you can setup in your home.

@RDO Servers answered you in full, i will just go ahead and agree, please do not do this, its a waste of money.

I heard about data center in some articles and it used to use by Google, Facebook or large companies...I think it is really too big for someone wants to build one. It could consume you more money/

Yes! it's possible. Just only keep in mind that the cost per server will increase becuase for low number of servers, you will have to maintain other facilities like generator, fire safety devices, CCTV monitoring (if req) etc. The main daunting task it to get high speed internet connectivity with pool of IPs.

You can start a module datacenter. Start small and then expand as you get more funds. But yeah, you can't start a datacenter in your home, but I know Yahoo were running their servers from their office back in 1995.

You cant start a data center from your home....Not at all. start up a data center will cost u so much money and time. if you are not ready for it please don't go into it.

IMHO, you shouldn't try to plunge into Datacenter business. While you cannot build a Datacenter with a single server at home, even building a small or mid-size datacenter needs capex. I would rather rent out co-location space with good Datacenter and resell services. You can choose the remote hands support from the Datacenter or hire your own engineers to manage the servers.

I totally disagree because if your are rich and have a big house with tones of space then it is possible.

I think you just need to know where to draw the line with home hosting, can you have 2 or 3 servers in a basement etc no problem.

I have a home server myself that I use for various things which I built with ultra quite fans and SSD's you would not even know it was on if not for the power light it's almost silent.
Once you starting expanding past 4 servers I would say it's time for colocation.

wpspeedster said:

Do you think it is possible to build a data center at home one server at a time. How would you start? or it's not recommended to do that?

Click to expand...

Yes its possible but I wouldn't do it for production servers. I'm not sure what everyone else is saying but its totally possible I have my own infrastructure in my garage and I use it for personal backups as well as functional operations throughout my house.

First you want to be sure to have a secure location to put your rack somewhere that you can easily access your breaker as well as access to a windows or cooling unit.

You want to buy a cooling device maybe a windows unit or a cooling unit that you can sit close to your rack or insulate some portion of the house or garage so you can control the temperature in the front of the cabinet and the back of the cabinet.

Contact providers in your area to see if they can run fibers to your house such as Cogent, Verizon, Comcast and Telia anyone like that or just get fiber from the nearest data center. This is not very costly I know from Cogent you can get a 10-100Mbps connection for about $400-$500 a month with IPv4 connection and IPv6 ready network. Verizon and Comcast would be higher and get that ran to your home.

You would also need to get reliant or whatever power company you have to come out and adjust your breaker for you because depending on the servers you will have in your cabinet it will pull some hefty power. You'll spend about $900 on a good 42U cabinet you whatever size you need.

Now the expensive part comes in when you talk about infrastructure. If you want to run a production for clients maybe locally or whatever you have going on you want to have a big network at least 10Gb/s in order to have some sort of DDoS mitigation hardware/software. Depending as I said before on what your trying to do you can get a pretty good router for $3,000 or so and a good firewall for $5,000. Go ahead and get you a good Cisco or Juniper switch L3+ for BGP and advance Routing just to backup the router which would run you about $5,000 if your serious about your project, once you have all that setup you should be good to go.

Your going to have to have some knowledge of how to set all this up so be sure you know what your getting into before you invest your money. I started this way and now I run my own colocation company, never let anyone tell you these things aren't possible stay ambitious and innovative.

If you need more information or need any help with anything let me know.

Cheers.

Unthinkable build data center is too expensive

It's possible to make your own home servers, but they should not be used corporately. There is no way you can afford to provide the infrastructure required to run decent servers. If you can't run decent servers, nobody will bother with your services. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and with that kind of money running them out of a house really is a limitation. You can rent out a data center rack/cage/floor that you simply go to and pay them monthly for their router, services, space etc. Not to mention, if you want a server rack in your room i hope you have somewhere else to sleep because there is no way your ever sleeping in that room again. Servers run loud. Have fun with all the dust buildup of your dirty unfiltered air. Unexpected raids from the police when your electricity bill sky rockets enough to be a drug lab.

Trust me, when i first started out a long time ago, i wanted to do the same exact thing. Your much better off renting a space in a data center somewhere.

Its possible Look at this idea

IBM Prefabricated Modular Data Center is a flexible, agile, scalable and compact modular data center can be deployed virtually at any location

https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/prefabricated-modular-data-center


Back in 1997 we ran our first data center it was just 3000 SQFT with a natural gas generator just remember back than there where higher profit margins

Sure... you can put a rack or even racks in your basement and setup some switches and fill it up with servers to use for development, storage, whatever else (that isn't part of your business) and call it a data center but don't even think about trying to provide a service to people using the "data center" in your basement. You're going to have a bad time and so would any unfortunate soul who would find themselves to be "hosted" by your "company".

Data Centers require large amount of capital and also quality management. DC provides specialised services for hosting servers etc. therefore it is not advisable to do it in your home.

Try renting space from data centers as they will be able to provide the support needed for DC services.

Yeah you can start your own data center. But it's very hard to maintain if you are only guy. You need very known technical team. and you can google about this what are the basic things you should required

Definitely not!

Assume you buy the hardware, what about the network ? what about the back up power?

If you do not have a stable internet & power system, none of your clients would be happy with your service as their servers would be down most of the time. Apart from this, there should be proper cooling system in place as servers generate heat which needs to be dissipated. Your home might not be designed in such a way to tackle the heating problem, datacenters are designed for proper air-ventilation thereby keeping the servers a bit cool along with air-conditioners.

It has to do with cost and if you are going to host clients. Thinks about it this way would you pay for a server to run your eCommerce website that makes you say 5k per day on a server in a basement. Now look at cost you have to be open 24/7 this is not shared 24/7 that you can fall asleep on, you have to have live persons at the location, not just someone from India, an engineer, cost per year 120k, Data Centers cost about 10 million. So if you got the cash go for it but not at home....

Back in the day, I'd say go for it...but this is not 1995-2005 anymore. Unless you have millions of dollars to invest, the contacts to find business, alot of business already lined up to fill the space, and then the knowledge to really know what you are doing...it's not worth it. The cost/availability of IP space, the never ending shrinking of profit margins, increased competition, it's really hard to succeed with this. Rather than expending your resources across too many areas, focus on what you are best at...running a Data Center, operating hosting infrastructure, finding business/sales, keeping clients happy with excellent customer service, are all different skills sets...and it's hard to find the time to do them all well at the same time these days.
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