Assessing Infrastructure Is Fundamental for a Colocation's Strategy

Posted by Chris Parlee on Mar 28, 2016

Electronic_Environments_Infrastructure_Solutions.pngH5 Data Centers is a leading privately owned data center operator with over 1,000,000 sq ft under management. They provide data center services to enterprise clients in [8] strategically located data centers in the following geographical locations:

Ashburn, VA Atlanta, GA
Charlotte, NC Denver, CO
Phoenix, AZ San Jose, CA
San Luis Obispo, CA Seattle, WA

H5 provides a variety of 3rd party data center services to corporate clients and public entities throughout theUS. Today, corporate enterprises are moving internal IT services to 3rd party providers, like H5, to capitalize on the explosion of “cloud” services [public and private] and to move to more of an Opex cost model so IT teams can concentrate on their core competency.

In 2015 and early 2016; EEC worked with H5’s team on 9 projects to increase their national footprint and improve their business strategy. EEC’s data center assessment and a design/build services enabled H5 to aggressively initiate tasks to meet these objectives. The following are two examples of how EEC’s team worked with H5 to enhance their services:Data Center Site Assessments

  • H5 Data Centers is a company on the move. They have goals to significantly increase their data center portfolio. During the 2nd half of 2015, H5 partnered with EEC to evaluate several existing data center properties through-out the US with the purpose to conduct a technical due diligence assessment of each property. These assessments focused on the evaluation of critical electrical and mechanical systems supporting critical loads [computer systems].  
  • A dedicated team from EEC evaluated [6] properties in four states/ five cities during a 3-month, non-stop project schedule
  • EEC’s services included a wide variety of strategical evaluations, engineering analyses, conceptual design, and engineering cost estimates.
  • Some of the more interesting results and recommendations included:
    • Uncovering a UPS concurrent maintainability fault
    • Developing solutions to resolve significant reliability and capacity deficiencies
    • Assessment of a 23-story data center hotel in 1-days, including review of critical MEP systems; life safety systems; and structural systems; and, development of a strategy to reconfigure multiple floors to new data center space
    • Conceptual study and cost analysis to re-use and re-locate [2] 3 mW standby generators while keeping the existing data center operational

Design/Build

  • In late 2015, H5 asked EEC’s Construction team to develop a design/build strategy to increase the critical load capacity at one of H5’s existing data centers in the Northwest. This data center is located in a congested down-town location and our design enhancements include:
    • 650 kw of new critical equipment load capacity
    • New upgraded electrical service including switchgear and UPS upgrades
    • New chilled water plant; piping systems; and critical air handling systemsdesign_Engineering2.jpg

 

EEC offers pre-construction services; design-build services; and construction management services to employ design enhancements like the ones mentioned above. As you can see from these two projects, site assessments of potential new data center facilities helped H5’s team move forward on expanding their portfolio and the design/build strategy gave H5’s team a plan to increase capacity in terms of infrastructure needs and enabled them to proactively address issues.

Tags: Design, Colocation, data center assessment