Upfront Capital. Before buying a data center, assess how you’ll cover upfront capital and ongoing expenses. You may want to leverage funds outside your normal operating budget, as owning your own data center to support customer information and cloud execution is secondary to core business requirements.

Level of Effort. What do you need to do to fully outfit the space as a data center? What codes need to be met, safeguards established, construction or efficiency updates made?

Business Focus. Do you have the expertise to manage a full data center without impacting day-to-day management of your business? Ownership of a data center may provide more control, but it also requires more involvement. You don’t want to find you’re spending more time managing data center requirements than your core business.

Employee Expertise. Do you have, or can you hire IT experts who can set up and maintain the various systems in a data center, including cooling, electrical, UPS, generators and more, on an ongoing basis?

Need. Will your business fully leverage the data center, be able to lease out any portion or grow into the full data center space, or will you be paying to build and maintain support your business does not need?

Data protection. Does the data center offer the level of security you and your clients require for your data storage? Is it protected not only against data breaches but also power outages? Do they leverage UPS to smooth out current and provide uninterrupted power?

Uptime. How long does it take the data center to return to normal operation after a downtime event? What is the typical downtime experienced by the data center? How often do they experience downtime events? What steps have they taken to reduce them?

Power. What type of UPS do they leverage and what is their efficiency rating? Is it something reliable that will keep your data accessible without passing high overhead costs through your lease agreement?

Storage volume. Are they able to meet the requirements you have for data storage and speed? Do they provide room to grow as your data needs change?

Business focus. Outsourcing data center management would allow the enterprise to concentrate on its core business and might be a more attractive option if there are any perceived weaknesses in the level of expertise required to manage a data center full time.

Footprint. Space is at a premium for today’s data centers, especially colocation houses. Every square foot of space must justify its necessity. When it comes to allocating space for power protection equipment, thinking outside the box is essential: What can be done to reduce the footprint?

Layout. Mission critical data centers often require multiple UPS and battery cabinets to protect connected loads long enough to either ride out the power outage or to transfer to the facility’s generator successfully. A back-to-back modular layout for UPS systems can be used to reduce the amount of space required. This layout can be achieved with a bus backplane that eliminates conventional conduits and cable runs. You may also want to consider UPS systems that use high-capacity, front terminal batteries, so fewer batteries (and sometimes even fewer battery cabinets) are required.

Power Usage. When it comes to power protection, it’s important to know that not all UPS are created equal. Look for UPS that will provide high levels of reliability and efficiency. This will reduce cost of ownership and improve power usage effectiveness (PUE). Scalability and modularity go a step further in increasing return on investment as well as achieving flexibility previously unavailable in large UPS installations.

Scalability. It is essential for power protection capacity to adjust with changing power requirements, whether it’s up or down. Many of today’s on-line, double-conversion UPS are designed to scale up in order to meet the increased power load in the future. However, additional UPS units and batteries will require more square footage in a data center. UPS built in a single or multi-module configuration facilitate a flexible architecture.