How to Plan a Server Room for a Growing Ashton-under-Lyne Business
Updated: Oct 9
The Short Run: Plan your server room around the business you'll be in five years from now, not the one you are today. Sort the location, power and cooling before any kit is bought, and leave at least half the cabinet empty on day one. Most expensive server room problems come from rooms that were planned as an afterthought.
It usually starts in a cupboard. A switch on a shelf, a router balanced on top of it, a NAS box on the floor and a nest of patch leads that only one person in the building understands.
That's fine when there are eight of you. It starts creaking at twenty-five. By forty, it's the thing stopping you adding desks, and the first thing to fall over when the office gets busy.
Ashton-under-Lyne is a good place to be a growing business right now. The Ashton Mayoral Development Zone takes in more than a million square feet of commercial space across St Petersfield, Ashton Moss and the town centre. And in February 2026, a 9.3-acre brownfield site in the town was sold for a new business park of five units, ranging from 9,300 to 54,000 sq ft. More space means more firms moving in, moving up and fitting out, and every one of them needs somewhere for the network to live.
Whether you're taking on a new unit at Ashton Moss or turning the back room of a converted mill into a proper comms room, the planning decisions are the same. Here they are, in roughly the order we'd work through them on a site survey.
One thing worth saying up front. Planning a server room is a two-sided job. Your IT team or managed service provider looks after the servers, the switches and how the network is set up. A cabling contractor like us builds the room they sit in: the cabinets, the cabling, the containment, the power and the security on the door. The rooms that work best are the ones where both sides talk before anything is bought.
Plan for the business you'll be in five years from now
Start with a headcount. How many people are you now, and how many do you expect in three to five years? Then count everything that needs a cable, because every one of those cables ends at your cabinet.
A quick worked example. Thirty desks at two data outlets each is 60 ports. Eight Wi-Fi access points on dual Cat6a runs adds another 16. Ten IP cameras, a couple of printers, a meeting room screen and an access control panel take you to around 90. That's two 48-port patch panels and the switches to match, before a single server goes in. Now add the growth you're planning.
That number decides almost everything else: the size of the cabinet, the power it draws, the heat it gives off and how much containment you need to get the cables there.
Do you need a server room or just a comms cabinet?
Plenty of businesses now run their email, files and software in the cloud and don't keep servers on site at all. They still need a comms cabinet, because the cabling, the switches, the firewall and the Wi-Fi all have to terminate somewhere.
As a rough guide, a wall-mounted 12U to 24U cabinet suits a small office with no on-site servers. Once you've got servers, storage or a phone system living on site, you're into a floor-standing 42U cabinet and a room you can close the door on. If you're anywhere near that line, plan for the bigger option. Moving a live comms setup later costs far more than building it right the first time.
Pick the right spot
Location is the hardest decision to undo, so it's worth getting right. Keep the room away from water: not under a toilet block or kitchen, and not with pipework running through the ceiling above the cabinet. Avoid south-facing outside walls that bake in the afternoon sun, and avoid basements if there's any history of flooding.
Try to keep it central. A copper data link has a 100-metre limit end to end, which in practice means around 90 metres of fixed cable from the patch panel to the outlet. A comms room tucked into one corner of a long unit can push the far desks past that. If it can't be central, you may need a second cabinet linked back to the first with fibre.
Then think about weight. A fully loaded 42U cabinet can top half a tonne, which matters on the upper floors of older buildings.
That comes up a lot in Ashton. A good share of the town's business space sits in converted mills and Victorian buildings, with thick walls, timber floors and ceiling voids that were never designed with cable containment in mind. They make characterful offices, but they need surveying properly. Our engineers are UKATA asbestos aware, which matters in buildings of that age before anyone drills a hole.
Size the cabinet and leave room to grow
For a floor-standing cabinet, we'd usually go 800mm wide rather than 600mm. The extra width gives you vertical cable management down each side, and that's what keeps a cabinet tidy three years in. Depth depends on the kit. Switches and patch panels are happy in a 600mm or 800mm deep cabinet, but rack-mounted servers often need 1000mm to 1200mm.
Aim to fill no more than about half the cabinet on day one. It feels like wasted space when it's installed. It won't in two years.
Leave room around it too. You want roughly a metre clear at the front and back so the doors open fully and an engineer can actually work, plus space for the cooling to do its job.
Power it properly
Server rooms fail on power more often than anything else. The cabinet should be on its own dedicated circuits, not sharing with the kitchen or the office printers. If your servers have dual power supplies, give them two separate feeds (an A feed and a B feed) so one tripped breaker doesn't take everything down.
Add a UPS. Size it to the actual load plus around 25% headroom for growth, and make sure the battery runtime is long enough for your IT team to shut things down cleanly, usually 10 to 15 minutes for a small room. Then test it, because a UPS that's never been tested is a guess.
Don't forget the less exciting bits. The cooling needs its own supply, the room needs decent lighting, and you'll want a couple of standard sockets for laptops and test kit so nobody unplugs something important to charge a phone. We handle this as part of our electrical installation work, so the power and the cabling are planned together rather than by two firms who've never met.
Keep it cool
So what temperature should a server room be? ASHRAE, whose guidance most equipment manufacturers follow, recommends that the air going into the kit sits between 18°C and 27°C. You don't need a fridge. You need it steady.
A wall cabinet with a couple of switches can usually get by with good ventilation and a fan tray. Once servers are involved, you need dedicated cooling. The office air con isn't enough, mainly because it's usually on a timer and switches off at weekends, which is exactly when a closed room full of servers quietly cooks itself.
Inside the cabinet, keep the airflow running front to back. Fit blanking panels in the empty slots so hot exhaust air doesn't loop round to the front, and keep cables out of the path of the fans.
Get the cabling right first time
The cabling is the hardest part to change once the room is in use, so it's where corners shouldn't be cut. For a growing business we'd recommend Cat6a structured cabling to desks and access points. It supports 10Gb speeds and higher-power PoE devices, so it won't be the bottleneck when you upgrade the switches. If the business spans more than one floor or building, link the cabinets with a fibre backbone.
Run the cables in proper containment, usually overhead basket tray dropping into the top of the cabinet, and keep data and power apart in line with the BS EN 50174-2 separation guidance so you're not inviting interference. Label both ends of every cable to match a floor plan. Use colour-coded patch leads cut to sensible lengths, so the front of the cabinet doesn't turn into spaghetti.
Every link should be tested and certified before handover. That's what qualifies the install for the 25-year manufacturer warranty on our structured cabling, and it gives your IT team a record they can actually trust.
Lock the door
A server room should be a room you can lock, and ideally one where you know who's been in. A fob-operated door entry system with an audit log is the simplest way to do that. We install access control systems from Paxton and IP cameras from brands like Hikvision and Axis, and a single camera on the comms room door is a cheap bit of peace of mind.
What good looks like
Walk into a well-planned server room and it's quiet, cool and boring, which is exactly the point. The cabinet is about half full. Every port is labelled and matches a drawing. The patch leads are the right length and the right colour. The temperature hasn't moved all week. The UPS has been tested. The door logs who's been in. And there's nothing on the floor apart from the cabinet.
That's a room your IT team can support without guessing, and one you can add ten desks to without calling anyone in a panic.
The bits that trip people up
Even well-planned rooms go wrong in a few predictable ways.
❌ The room turns into a store cupboard
Boxes, spare chairs and the Christmas tree end up stacked in front of the cabinet, blocking the airflow and the access. It happens in almost every office we visit. Put a sign on the door if you have to.
❌ Nobody keeps the records up to date
The original install was labelled perfectly, then three years of quick changes went in without anyone updating the drawings. Regular network maintenance and a periodic cabinet audit keep the records honest.
❌ Building work catches you out
A fit-out next door or a new suspended ceiling can disturb containment and cables if nobody knows they're there. Share your cable routes with whoever's doing the work before they start.
❌ Upgrades happen during office hours
Re-patching or moving a live cabinet while the whole team is trying to work is how a two-hour job becomes a lost day. We do this kind of work out of hours and at weekends, so the office comes back on Monday and nobody notices.
Planning a server room? Start with a free site survey
If your comms cupboard is already full, or you're fitting out new space in Ashton-under-Lyne and want the room right first time, the place to start is a site survey. Not a quote based on square footage. An actual survey, on site, where we look at the building, the cable routes and the power before anything gets priced.
Viking Communications plans and installs server and comms rooms across Greater Manchester and the rest of the UK, from our base just up the road in Lees. That covers the structured cabling, fibre, containment, power and access control, backed by a 25-year manufacturer warranty on the structured cabling and a CNCI® and ECS certified team. Site surveys are free, with no hidden charges in the quote.
📞 0161 660 3002
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