1. Site, Facility & Civil
Where the hall lives — power availability, structure, space planning, and perimeter.
- Site selection & due diligence
- Building structure & slab
- White space / gray space planning
- Architectural envelope
Facility domain →
2. Power
Utility to rack — UPS, generators, busway, and branch monitoring.
- Utility & medium-voltage gear
- UPS & energy storage
- Generators & fuel systems
- Floor PDUs / RPPs & busway
- Rack PDUs & BCM
- Grounding & power quality
Power domain →
3. Cooling & Heat Removal
ASHRAE envelopes through liquid and immersion for AI density.
- CRAC / CRAH & containment
- Chilled water plant
- Direct-to-chip + CDUs
- Immersion cooling
- Free cooling / economizers
- PUE / WUE optimization
Cooling domain →
4. Racks & Physical Infrastructure
Cabinets, layout, pathways, the structured cabling plant, and colo cage fit-out.
- Enterprise & high-density racks
- Cable managers & blanking
- Seismic & grounding kits
Racks domain →
5. Networking
Fabrics, optics, and services that stitch the hall together.
Network domain →
6. Compute
From general-purpose servers to GPU racks and HCI.
- Rackmount & multi-node
- 3-tier vs HCI and hypervisor licence metrics
- HCI appliances (HCI)
- GPU / AI accelerators (AI cluster systems: AI Factory)
- Server networking (NICs, host bonding, DPU)
- Composable compute
- BMC / Redfish provisioning
- Firmware lifecycle
Compute domain →
6b. HCI
Hyperconverged clusters — appliance and software-defined node patterns.
HCI domain →
7. Storage
Block, file, and object platforms plus data services.
Storage domain →
8. Backup, Archive & DR
Protection copies, vaulting, and failover orchestration.
- Backup software & appliances
- Dedupe targets & VTL
- Tape libraries & offsite
Backup domain →
9. Ops, Safety & Control Planes
DCIM, BMS, EPMS, fire, environmental sensing — Ops owns facility control planes; physical security (access control, CCTV/VMS) and cyber platforms are on Security.
Ops domain →
10. Security
Physical access & VMS, Hybrid Mesh Firewall / NGFW, identity & PAM, data-protection security coordination, OT/CPS, and AI-factory controls.
Security domain →
11. Governance
Strategy, policy, accountability, risk and assurance — and what ISO/IEC 27001, NIST, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS and CMMC require of the DC design. Implementation is on Security and the pages it links to.
Governance domain →
AI Factory — the AI build-out path
When the goal is a private training / inference cluster rather than a single domain refresh, use the dedicated AI Factory guide: GPU system classes, the software stack, facility readiness across power, cooling, and racks, AI cluster networking (back-end, storage, and front-end separation; RoCEv2, InfiniBand, Ultra Ethernet), and a phased Pilot → Production → Scale build.
Open AI Factory →
Focus shortlist
Twenty categories ideal for Cloudbit product-comparison briefs.
1UPS systems (IT load)
2Rack PDUs (intelligent / metered)
3Busway / busbar distribution
4CRAC / CRAH units
5Containment systems (hot/cold aisle)
6Direct-to-chip liquid cooling + CDUs
7Immersion cooling systems
8Enterprise server racks / cabinets
9Spine-leaf / ToR switching
10Next-gen firewalls (data center) — see Security
11Load balancers / ADCs — see Network
13Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)
14All-flash storage arrays (AFA)
15On-prem object storage
16Backup appliances & software
17Tape libraries / VTL
18DCIM platforms
19Environmental sensor platforms
20Clean-agent fire suppression