Data Center Construction: A Developer's Eye View

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Construction is a process that's fraught with the potential for error and missed deadlines from moving rock with explosives to withstanding typhoon weather, some data center developers have seen it all.

What's it like to be on the front lines of a major data center construction project? Chris Curtis, co-founder and SVP of Development for Compass Datacenters, takes us on the odyssey of construction with his sometimes tongue-in-cheek posts about the process. Chris describes the complexity of the construction process for data centers, explores the ups and downs (and mud and rain) of constructing data center facilities and highlights the creative problem-solving required for the unexpected issues that sometimes arise with every construction process. We present his entire series as a whole for your reading enjoyment.

Building A Data Center Can Be A Blast: A Little TNT Can Help

The need to blast through rock in site preparations for a new data center can be a challenge. Like most things in the development world, the requirement to conduct "controlled explosions" has some benefits (What guy doesn't like blowing things up?) and drawbacks.

Data Center or Ark? How Bad Weather Causes Construction Chaos

A data center construction project must have a schedule and that schedule must allow for the fact that during a six-month construction period, you’re probably going to run into some less than optimal weather. This column describes how about running into much more than sub-optimal weather in the data center construction process can lead to cranky tempers and tough negotiations with sub-contractors.

A Race To The Finish: The Final Phase of Construction On A Data Center Facility

This column covers the last phase of a data center development project. A tight schedule tends to add a degree of intensity to things. People are focused and the inter-dependencies of various operations become even more critical. And that's when the "tour groups" show up.