#TL;DR

TL;DR

#The Larger Story

The Larger Story

#Conclusion

Conclusion

#Addendum 1

Addendum 1

#Addendum 2

Addendum 2

#Addendum 2

I made another Venn diagram! This is rough, not to scale, and hastily tossed together while past midnight, but I hope this at least conveys the thought:

So there are definitely portions of work in DC design that shouldn't be touched by sysadmins, most notably the ones where law is involved, and structural engineering is needed. But datacenter design is only partly about those things. Yes, stay away from decisions regarding laws about doors, precise placement of anti-fire systems, locks, etc.

But the pink stuff, and the blue stuff in the diagram above are things that can, by and large, be touched by a sysadmin or the final decisions can be made by sysadmins (thus making sysadmins in-part designers). Not the physical installation of a CRAC or the circuit panels, but the decision on how much cooling, how much power, and even specific vendors to go with. Not necessarily cable pulling (although, how many sysadmins have pulled cable in their life? Can I see a count of hands? Uh-huh. A lot of us wire fishers, huh) but choosing cable types, amounts, and even plant paths to account for growth in IDFs outwards from the MDF. Certainly I'm not thinking about monster DCs, but rather a few hundred to thousand square feet of server room / datacenter space. Apple-sized DCs -- no way.

#Addendum 1

Iain brings up a good point: "Datacenter design is an architecture task"

I can both agree and disagree with that. Selecting load bearing beams, rebar sizes and placement, lashings for ducts, what mix of concrete to pour, and etc. would be for the architectural engineers. Placement of racks, choice of voltages, runs of cable, sizing cooling systems, types of battery switchovers could be something a sysadmin does, but could also be part of an architectural engineer / datacenter designer's job. A sysadmin doesn't have to be bonded, licensed, or otherwise take a state-official engineering exam to make most of those decisions (depending on locality of course). So while it's not necessarily a part of a sysadmin's job, it could be within the scope and by experience is within the scope.

I think part of the controversy is the scale of what we think of as a "datacenter." It can mean anything from a few hundred square foot place for a handful of racks, to a million square foot, billion dollar city-state of a complex. A sysadmin is unlikely to have much to say about the larger datacenters, or speciality structures for high density, HPC uses. However for the approximately 1,000 to 2,000 square foot server rooms / small datacenters, sysadmins are, in my experience, normally the ones who have a large part in the actual design of those rooms, even to the point of CADing out placement of racks and thinking about air flow, etc.

Converting a few hundred to few thousand foot segment of office space, warehouse, basement, or what-have-you into a "datacenter" complete with raised floor, tons of cooling, backup power, generators, fuel contracts, wiring, voltage selection, etc. has, once again only in my experience, been largely up to the sysadmins of an organization and is not technically or (sometimes) legally an architectural/engineering issue other than "call the structural engineer to see if the floor can hold us!"