Strategic Site Selection for Data Centers

Strategic Site Selection for Data Centers: Mitigating Risks and Optimizing Sustainability Amid Resource Demand and Extreme Weather or Geophysical Impacts

Background:
Data centers are critical infrastructure in our digitally connected world. The government and businesses depend on data centers to provide digital services we rely on to power our daily lives. Agencies continue to migrate to the cloud to gain efficiencies of scale and capabilities. In addition, their expenditures on legacy systems are reduced as well as the physical space needed for aging infrastructure.

As the government and commercial world continue to move to the cloud, the physical placement of data centers becomes extremely important to ensure the continuation of digital services. The risks of placing a data center in a sub-optimal geographic location can lead to financial loss, interruption of critical services, and loss of trust in the provider of the services in the data center.

Objective:
The purpose of this project is to offer actionable insights which will support informed decision-making around data center selection and placement. The goal is to raise awareness of the need to promote data center resilience, secure placement, and effective use of resources to maximize operational efficiency and business continuity.

The team will provide strategic recommendations for the optimal placement of data centers, informed by a thorough analysis of resource demand, infrastructure risk, and extreme weather impacts.

Outcomes:
The project team will develop a risk evaluation tool that will help identify critical aspects of a data center such as location, use of resources, and other resiliency measures. In addition, the team will also present their findings at a COI meeting or other similar events.

Membership:

The project welcomes volunteers from government and industry with technical experience and expertise in the following areas:

• Extreme weather risks, flood, heat, wildfires, seismic activity.
• Technical expertise in the domains of server efficiency and cooling requirements.
• Domain expertise in modeling data center or server energy usage.
• Construction expertise.
• Legal expertise around risk management.

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