http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/real-world-web-application-benchmarking/203367363919 Facebook has build custom web-app testing framework to test server performance. Read it, especially the section on why “standard” SPECxxx benchmarks are not a good measure of anything. Also, ready about performance-per-watt, as this is really important for modern data centers.
http://www.guardiannetworks.com/articles/2009/10/29/orange-county-data-centers/ blog article about current (Q4-2009) offerings for colocation services in Orange County. Info general info is pretty accurate, pricing information is [surprisingly] accurate as well, withing about 30% margin.
http://racktables.org/ “Racktables is a nifty and robust solution for datacenter and server room asset management. It helps document hardware assets, network addresses, space in racks, networks configuration and much much more!”
http://www.openxtra.co.uk/articles/calculating-heat-load.php how to figure out what HVAC unit you need to cool the servers