Ok heres the question of the day :) When considering a colocation facility is it a determining factor on whether you locate your server there based on whether or not they have a raised floor design.

After doing much research I find that many companys are going the way of flat floor design, because todays air units can provide just as adequate air condition with either design, also after reading through articles I see that alot of companys beieve it or not have trouble with rodents getting in the raised floor design and chewing through cables etc....

Charles,

With the newer cooling units its been my experience that it does not make a difference. In fact, I think, that a falt floor has some advantages. It is a lot eaiser to trace cables if you are running them overhead, as opposed to through the floor.

Of course the downside is that one axe-toting maniac is all it would take to sever your cable and power :D.

At the AboveNet facility near me, I believe they don't use raised floors. Everything's up in the ceiling, but I don't recall their rationale. Cable & Wireless here have raised floors, but their data center is on the seventh floor. AboveNet is ground-level.

Rats in the NOC? Hmm, get a new NOC. Rats will go anywhere in search of what attracts them.

I don't think it really matters. And cables are much easier to trace overhead.

raised floors have some advantages
- better air flow for air conditioning
- water leaks: does not immediately affect your systems

How do you figure water leaks dont ammed. effect your systems, water pipes are ran overhead, in the event one of them brakes its going to still dump water over the equipment, as for water collecting underneith most flat floor designs have drains built in.

And as far as air circulation, im not sure thats true with todays air conditioners they can push air just as far as you need it too.

Really the only advantage I can see to raised floor design is that if you have one rack of servers generating tons of heat I suppose you could pull up a floor grid and vnet air on those servers, but the servers shouldnt be generating that much heat in the first place, if they are venting and cooling properly.

Also I would be worried about the load capacity of those raised floor designs, they obv. cant support the same amount of weight IE load that a concrete reinfoced floor could....

oh well just my 2cents...

The raised flooring is a thing of the past. The newer datacenters don't bother with raised flooring. There is no need to.

One thing that is important, is that the flooring is anti-static.

Actually, a good CoLo would never have rats anywhere near the equipment. We use a raised floor and we have positive-pressure environmental controlled air ported right into the bottom of each cabinet. Hardware stays cooler, lives longer, less maintenance, more time off.......golfing....

I didnt ask what you have i just wanted to know peoples opinions

I want to to appologize first, for mentioning what we have at our facility, in conjunction with backing up my opininions about raised floor vs, straight installs. Didn't mean to blatently point out anything such as "dtwebworks.com for the lowest price in colocation and dedicated servers." which might be possibly construed as advertising.
The point is, raised floors definately have their advantages, especially with todays higher density hosting servers. 1RU's, 2RU's and even 1/2RU's mean we can now get as many as 80 independent machines in a cabinet (sometimes more). The heat becomes an issue, if the air isn't forced through the cabinet bottom to top.

No problem, you might glance at the forum rules, as your allowed to advertise in your signiture as I do, but not in your message. Good to see a new face on the board.

Yup, thanks. This is definately one of the best sites I have been on. There is some sharp guys in here with topics that get the juices flowing. I love a good challenge. Spent hours in here last night... :)
The raised floors definately jack up the initial cost of a datacenter buildout, but the total cost of ownership is definately worth it. I recommend doing both types, to keep the cost down. You can keep the higher density equipment on the raised floor, and the traditional 4U/5U/6U and up equipment on the cement floor with the overhead management. This will keep the investment cost to a minimum, and give you the best of both worlds.