Also key is not basing your design on the requirements of any one vendor’s equipment. “You don’t want to design your space for Vendor A because Vendor A may not be around in three to five years,” says Falkin from Baker Robbins. “You design it in a way so that it is flexible enough to accommodate a range of different vendors and technologies.” As data centers become more densely packed with equipment, he adds, “the difficult issues here aren’t necessarily about space but about things like power, cooling and cabling. From a future standpoint, it’s all about designing these core systems in a manner that allows you to grow or shrink as your needs change.”

The heart of any big company’s tech program, of course, is the data center. Kirkland’s will share space on the fourth floor with the base building’s mechanical operations, a relatively unusual arrangement but advantageous from a cost point of view because such spaces, like data centers, typically are built with heavier floors. “We were able to benefit from the standard engineering that comes into play on mechanical floors,” says Novak.

Kirkland’s 8,000-square-foot data center will contain four 625 KVA Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) systems, 240 tons of cooling capacity and a 2,000-kilowatt generator.

The firm’s top-to-bottom approach also included demands for prime space on the roof for its satellite communications equipment. The roof, says Novak, is something that needs to be addressed very early in the process because it affects the aesthetics or look of the fa¿e. He added that Kirkland hasn’t fully defined what it will use the space for but that an antenna to boost wireless signals within the building is likely.

A CIO-Landlord Partnership

Kirkland—which has a substantial in-house real estate practice—also devised a unique 100-plus-page lease that includes a 20-page subsection devoted to tech requirements.

“We’ve never seen anything like that lease,” says Hines’ Bowman.

“We originally started down the traditional path where tech requirements are scattered throughout the lease but it just became too cumbersome to manage all the information,” says Novak. “You have a sentence here and a clause there and it’s difficult to keep track of all of it—especially because we had a far more detailed program than is customary. Also, what started to be a challenge was we found that we would add elements to the lease and then somewhere along the way they would get changed during some other conversation or negotiation. The solution was to make the tech portion of the lease a discrete document. It’s harder to change that.”