You may have decided to hire an “owner’s rep” first, or you may have just decided to hire an architect. Either way, you need someone who watches out for your best interest and knows how to build your building.
If you’re like most owners or developers, your ego, and hopefully your design team’s ego, wants to build the best building you can for the allotted budget.
Unfortunately technology and all the relationships with that technology is usually an afterthought by your design team.
Oh don’t get us wrong, you will buy a ton of technology for your facility, but will it be unified?
Your building will be brimming with technology. The problem is it may not be coordinated to take full advantage of making your building a truly unique Experience. Did you know that your building will have what is called The Internet of Things (IoT) in almost every piece of electrical equipment that is purchased for your facility? We call the IoT for facilities “Facility Nodes”.
A facility node is an addressable device that can share information with a network. In the future, these devices will be anything that have power going into it. Keep in mind “power” may be solar power, such as a solar powered sensor. It might even be based on temperature differentials and kinetic energy such as with the opening of a door or window.
Power is not even a prerequisite for passive Radio-frequency identification (RFID) which will soon be embedded in everything from carpeting to drywall. These too are considered “facility nodes”, which must be managed.
But most of the network traffic will be derived from items such as chillers, air handling units, security cameras, and other data intensive items, including your servers and all the associated infrastructure supporting those servers.
(i) We approach all of our projects with an “open book” philosophy. What doe...