Data centers are an increasingly common sight among warehouses and the spaces that contain them.

Whether your business deals in cloud storage directly, you’re running your own data center to better manage the needs and demands of your business as a whole, or you’re simply renting out space in your warehouse to help accommodate someone else’s data center, keeping these server farms organized is key to making sure they run smoothly, preventing accidents, and reducing clutter.

The first step, in nearly any case of data centers, is to organize aisles by temperature need. Different types of servers and mainframes need to be kept in either hot or cold temperature-controlled areas, and maintaining proper delineation and air flow between the two is crucial for preventing errors and protecting costly equipment. Set up your racks with something like wire shelving that can allow the air to flow through, and make sure to keep everything separate and moving in the correct direction to ensure the right air is getting to the right areas.

In addition to protecting the servers within the center itself, you also need to take steps to keep them safe on the way in. Take time to plan and design a quarantine area located just outside the data center. Set up an ‘airlock’ right outside the door that’s cleaned on a daily basis, static-free, and loaded up with shelving that can resist corrosion and static like NSF plastic shelving to help unpack equipment and leave things that can’t be brought into the data center itself behind safely.

If you’ve spent a lot of time in other data centers, you’re probably already expecting our next tip—cable management. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to this as every data center is going to have different cabling needs, but it’s important to implement zip-ties and proper cable tracking (using different colors where able), as well as to trunk your cables where needed—the process of keeping pre-terminated cables in a jacket or rubber sleeve that saves space and keeps them separated from the other cables.

Lastly, security at all points of the data center needs to be refined and inspected constantly. Keep all needed equipment in secured lockers, make sure the data center itself (or even specifically just the entrance, for added security) is kept inside a security partition, and do everything possible to limit access to this area by unauthorized personnel.

Got any tips of your own for organizing data centers? Leave a comment below!