What goes into a well-designed data center? An incredible amount of complicated, intricate, fragile and expensive gear. When you and your team are in charge of putting it all together, how the heck do you know where to start? IT Business Edge pulled together an exceptionally helpful guide to designing and building out a data center. If you're in a small or medium-size enterprise, it may be a bit of information overload, but the principles are solid no matter the horsepower of your servers.

Among the more interesting findings: The alleged industry standard cost for building a data center, $600 to $900 per square foot, is actually too high. The correct numbers are $400 to $700. That's certainly good to know. You can also download several worksheets and templates that will help you start to run some numbers on your own data center needs.

While you're at it, get inspired by checking out this photo tour of the Siemens Information Systems Center near Philadelphia, a facility that processes approximately 201 million transactions daily, including hospitals checking patient insurance eligibility to computerized physician order entry. About 40 percent of U.S. population has medical data hosted there. With more than 5,000 servers, this may be the most hard-core data center you've ever seen.

Just look at the size of those cooling pipes.

-- Don Willmott