Planning remains a major challenge for small and large IT facilities. Data center build and upgrade projects are typically planned using methods resembling art more than science, in a process often perceived as intimidating, unstructured, and difficult. Plans are poorly communicated among the various business stakeholders within the organization. Planners may be presented with proposals that are presented in excruciating technical detail, yet still lack the information they need to make decisions. Small changes in plans can have major cost consequences or create downstream surprises and disasters, which are the IT layers of the data center.

The planning sequence described in this paper covers the design of the data center's physical infrastructure layer, whose job it is to house, power, cool, and protect the data center's computing and network functions , which are the IT layers of the data center. This planning sequence assumes that the determination of computing requirements and the general design of the IT layers has already taken place. Certain characteristics of the IT system concept then provide essential input to the planning of the physical infrastructure, as will be seen in the first task of the planning sequence.