Data Center and IT Equipment Installation in an Old Building: A Case Study of a Government Office in Thailand

Building a data center presents many obstacles and requires meticulous planning with expertise in civil engineering, electrical systems, ventilation, air conditioning design, network configuration, and system administration with limited time and cost. Three types of data center installation exist: newly installed data centers in old buildings, newly constructed data centers inside newly constructed buildings, and renovated old data centers in old buildings. There are unique challenges in a different type of data center. This work focuses on building data centers in old buildings and analyzing problems in each stage to present a novel guideline called "Pre-Stage." By systematically addressing problems in each stage together with the experience of managing a data center project in an old government office building in Thailand, this article designs a guideline for IT project management for a data center project to ensure that it is built to meet data center standards, cost, and time management efficiently. After implementing this guideline, the project timeline is reduced by 10% and the project can be finished earlier than expected.