With few exceptions, modern enterprises depend heavily on IT to deliver business-critical services—often in real-time and directly to end users. This makes it essential that mission-critical data centres are designed, maintained, and operated with maximum availability, efficiency, and resilience in mind.
Yet in practice, many data centres still fall short of meeting the increasingly demanding requirements for availability, capacity, safety, and energy efficiency. This challenge is further intensified in high-compute environments, where advanced workloads such as AI, HPC, and large-scale data analytics drive up power densities and place significant stress on traditional cooling systems. Ensuring thermal performance in such conditions is now just as vital as electrical reliability.
The Certified Data Centre Specialist (CDCS®) is a comprehensive three-day course designed to equip participants with the knowledge and skills to act as informed, capable counterparts when dealing with data centre design and operations especially in high-demand environments. Participants will be able to evaluate design proposals for accuracy, effectiveness, and efficiency, including solutions related to power and cooling infrastructure.
CDCS® is an essential certification for data centre professionals seeking to enhance their technical credibility and decision-making capabilities. It is also a prerequisite for those aiming to attain the elite Certified Data Centre Expert (CDCE®) status.
The primary audience for this course includes data centre specialists, facilities managers and IT professionals who work in and around data centres and are responsible for ensuring and enhancing their availability and manageability around the data centre and having the responsibility to achieve and improve high-availability and manageability of the data centre.
Prerequisites participants must hold a valid CDCP® certificate in order to be able to register for the CDCS® class.
After completion of the course the participant will be able to:
- Understand the data centre design life cycle, including the distinct stages involved.
- Discuss the data centre requirements at a great level of detail with vendors, suppliers and contractors to ensure that these requirements are met.
- Validate design documentation, cost quotations, and technical proposals provided by vendors and contractors to confirm compliance with requirements.
- Understand redundancy levels for both the data centre design/setup and maintenance.
- Understand the various building considerations such as bullet proofng, seismic activity mitigation, fire ratings and thermal stability.
- Understand the correct installation practices for raised flooring systems and to prevent issues such as misalignment, level discrepancies, and leakage.
- Understand how to read a Single Line Electrical Diagram to e ffectively identify and mitigate common design flaws.
- Choose the correct UPS and parallel configuration, while gaining the knowledge required to recognise and avoid typical errors associated with parallel installations.
- Understand how to calculate battery banks and assess vendor-proposed configurations to verify compliance with design and performance requirements.
- Understand the appropriate separation distances needed to mitigate electromagnetic field (EMF) risks to human health and avoid interference with sensitive equipment.
- Understand the fundamental cooling system design, encompassing effeciency metrics, installation prerequisites, airflow rates (CFM), temperature differentials (Delta-T), and other essential performance parameters.
- Understand how to evaluate and select advanced liquid cooling solutions that are specifically designed to meet the thermal and operational demands of AI and high-performance computing (HPC) environments.
- Understand contamination factors and limitations.
- Understand fire suppression systems, including the various available options, methods for calculating gas volume requirements, and procedures for verifying correct system installation.
- Understand how to assess data centre energy efficiency using industry-standard metrics, and explore methods to enhance overall energy performance.
Data Centre Design/Life Cycle Overview
- Phases of the data centre life cycle
Standards and Rating Level Definitions
- Rating levels history and definitions
- Standards and guideline comparison
- N-redundancy options
- Distributed redundant options
- Concurrent maintainability
- Fault tolerant
- Substation requirements
- Example topologies
- Maintenance options
Building Considerations
- Building location and floor loading considerations
- Floor and hanging loads requirements
- Firing rating for walls and glass
- Blast protection and bullet proofing
- Forced entry protection
Advanced Raised Floor & Suspended Ceiling
- Raised Floor installation requirements
- Common raised floor problems
- Seismic protection
- Requirements for suspended ceiling
Advanced Power
- Electrical formulae
- Single Line Diagram (SLD)
- Overcurrent protection devices
- Earth Leakage protection
- Sizing of protective components
- Surge protection
- Power cabling and PDU requirements
- Types of generators
- Generator components
- Fuel storage and calculation
- Generator parallelling
- Required UPS specifications
- UPS parallel configuration
- Harmonic filters
- Battery bank terminology
- Calculating battery banks
- Battery charging
- Parallelling battery banks
- Battery testing
- Battery case selection
- Flywheel
- Hydrogen fuel cells
Advanced Electro Magnetic Fields
- Sources of EMF
- Single and three phase radiation
- Measuring EMF
- Safe distance guidance
- Calculation of EMF attenuation factors
Advanced Cooling
- Cooling definitions
- Psychrometric chart
- ASHRAE recommendations
- Heat dissipation
- Equipment airflow
- Floor plan set-up
- Types of perforated tiles
- Rack door construction
- Delta-T and impact
- Optimizing airflow
- Thermal unit conversions
- Calculating air volume displacement (CFM/CMH)
- Cooling capacity calculations
- Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
- Air-conditioner efficiency
- SHR impact on OPEX
- Efficiency indicators
- Air-conditioner selection
- Humidity control
- Redundancy requirements
- Installation requirements
- Service corridor considerations
- Set points and calibration
- Advanced cooling technologies – air cooling
- Advanced cooling technologies – liquid cooling
Advanced Fire Protection
- Fire triangle
- Fire detection systems
- Installation and testing of smoke sensors
- Water-based suppression systems
- Gas-based suppression systems
- Calculate gas content
- Release and hold times
- Fire detection panel requirements
- Verification of installation
- Ongoing maintenance
- Alternative systems
Designing and Installing Scalable Network Cabling Systems
- TIA-942 cabling structure topology
- Copper and fibre cabling
- ToR and EoR design
- Installation best practices
- Grounding and bonding
- Cables labelling and administration
Environmental Specifications / Contamination Control
- Acoustic noise e ffects, regulations, specifications and limits
- Data centre contamination categories
- Contamination measurements, standards and limits
- Preventive measures
Data Centre Efficiency
- Business drivers for environmental sustainability
- Green standards and guidelines
- Power Usage E ectiveness (PUE)
- PUE categories
- Additional performance metrics
- Open Compute Project (OCP)
- Savings on cooling infrastructure
- Savings on light infrastructure
The CDCS® course is lectured by an EPI Certified Instructor using a combination of lectures and question-and-answer sessions to discuss participants’ specific needs and challenges experienced in their own environment. Participants are able to tap into the extensive experience of the trainer enabling them to validate and improve their own environments thus adding tremendous business value.
CDCS® course available in the following delivery methods:
The classes are available on public schedule as well as private group training.
Exam: Certified Data Centre Specialist (CDCS®)
The exam is a 90-minute closed book exam, with 60 multiple-choice questions. The candidate requires a minimum of 45 correct answers to pass the exam.
Candidates who successfully pass the exam will receive the official ‘Certifed Data Centre Specialist’ certificate. The certification is valid for three years after which the student needs to re-certify. More information is available on the EPI corporate website at www.epi-ap.com.
The CDCS® course and certification is accredited by EXIN, which is a global, independent and not-for-profit accreditation and examination institute. EXIN's mission is to improve the quality of the IT and data centre sectors, the proficiency of IT and data centre professionals and the IT users, by means of accreditation of course material as well as independent examination and certification. Every day, EXIN examinations are taken in more than 125 countries on six continents, and in more than 15 languages.
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