¶ … Personnel and Operations Today, data centers are a vital part of business, especially when significant growth is experienced. A data center provides a way for businesses to keep track of both the history of operations and the planning process that occurs as a result. Depending on the size and presence of a particular business, data centers can take either a virtual or physical form. Data centers can occupy a single room in a building belonging to the business or an entire building. For Night Owl Reading, a bookstore in New York City, NY, the data center location requirements will begin as a single adjacent room within the store. Personnel, schedule, and operational procedures will need to be thoroughly planned in order to make the data center a success.

Background

Night Owl Reading is a bookshop that operates locally in the New York City area. Being relatively traditional, it only recently expanded its operations to the online and global markets. Hence, data operations also occurred on a relatively small scale. The expansion of its operations, however, has convinced managers that a separate data center has become necessary. To continue Night Owl's competitiveness in the intellectual market, managers have come to the conclusion that additional components such as e-books and publishing services will have to become part of the company's operations. To manage this new integrated grid of services, a separate data center would be required.

Description

To create a successful data center, sufficient head space needs to be included for future growth. It is expected that Night Owl will continue to grow as new business opportunities present themselves. Hence, space needs to be sufficient to ensure that additional components and size adjustments can be included. The room allocated for the data center, as mentioned, is adjacent to the physical store itself. Space is available on the property to increase the floor size when this becomes necessary...

The space will contain four computer terminals to handle four types of data processing components.
Data entry employees will enter data related to general accounting, offline book sales, online and e-book availability and sales, and publishing services. Each terminal will include databases to contain information relating to customers, the amount of each title sold, and the income generated from each type of sale. These databases will be used for analysis and future business decisions, such as which books to stock, which to discontinue, and which to order on a demand basis.

Three cooling systems will manage the heat generated by the computer terminals and central processing units. To save power, cooling air will be supplied only when a certain heat level is reached. This is monitored by an automatic detection device that communicates with the air conditioning system. Since the initial data center is relatively small, a computer room air conditioning system (CRAC) will be used.

Power distribution will initially also occur on a relatively small scale, with patch panels and switches to provide sufficient power to the computer processing units and terminals. Delta transformers will monitor the amount of voltage coming into the data center. The transformer configuration will be Delta to Wye.

Two standby transformers will be included to ensure the data systems do not lose power, especially at critical times of data entry or communications.

Personnel

According to Kabay (2003), personnel selection are one of the key components of data center success. As such, a business manager must ensure that sufficiently experienced personnel are appointed for each component of the data center while also avoiding excessive redundancy within the center. This factor becomes increasingly complicated as the data center grows in size. Again, since Night Owl's data center is only starting its operations on a relatively small scale,…