The project covered a wide range of elements. Following pre-construction surveys, UNG identified high levels of business and operation risk with regards to the existing Chilled Water Infrastructure and site’s ability to accommodate such high growth demand. Not only were the existing areas in need of repair but the requirement for these areas needed re-establishing by BRAG and Design Assessments.

The design cleverly achieved a step change in space utilisation from its low density legacy data centre origin through targeted zoning to underutilised areas, which were converted to independent state of the art high density contained environments within which efficiency, resilience, security and IT density had been increased.

A new site wide 1MW N+1 Free Cooling Chilled Water System was installed including the replacement of all circuit pipework, Indoor CRAC units, pumps, and ancillary components. The system was innovatively designed to provide load reactive variable pressure differentially controlled capacity output to all 5nr technical rooms without depending on any complex BMS systems and strategies – meeting our clients FDM SLA capabilities.

Capacity control within the legacy data centres was extremely poor, meaning the commissioning of growth zone capacity was very difficult and necessitated overcooling. These legacy environments were fully optimised through plenum baffling, rack blanking, heat re-circulation prevention containment and re-designed air management to improve effectiveness up to 90%. These areas were categorised and commissioned to variable thermal capacity with all growth positions pre-rated and labelled accordingly.

The new state of the art growth facilities were complete with thermally contained hot aisles, thermal zone LED perception lighting, securely concealed and access controlled critical engineering plant zones and fire suppression/detection systems.

The re-developed facility now provides a foundation for the client to support business growth for the foreseeable future.