Woking Data Centre

We were commissioned to transform an existing high bay distribution warehouse into a state of the art 260,000 ft² co-location data centre housing 16 different tenants; providing project and cost management and CDM health & safety advice. 

Challenge

With major blue chip companies looking to out-source their IT solutions, possibly for the first time, our client identified a gap in the data centre market for high quality, technically bespoke solutions.

Tenants included government agencies, international banks, hedge funds and stock market trading platforms. Each data hall was a bespoke design solution with dedicated plant and operating systems necessitating intense co-ordination between all project teams. 

The developer had pre-let significant amounts of the new facility and committed to a demanding programme for completion. Tenant representatives were also involved in inspecting the progress of the works and final specification details were worked up collaboratively between our team, main contractor and signed off by principles throughout the build phase. All these aspects had to be co-ordinated, managed and delivered against a pre-determined schedule and budget.

Solution

We oversaw the tailored design solutions, meeting the precise technical requirements for each tenant including: power availability and density in the white space, resilience and tier rating for the overall design, fire detection and suppression systems as well as state of the art biometric controlled security access systems.

Electrical and cooling systems are fully redundant with no single points of failure. Multiple resilient options provide a robust and secure solution to the multiple tenant occupation. Power is served with 2N electrical systems and industry-leading UPS.

Our core team was located on site for the duration of the scheme with support from our London and Birmingham offices. Procurement and long-lead items were carefully managed throughout their journey to site, factory visits for testing and progress were made regularly to ensure the European supply chain was performing.

The HV transformers were so large that their route to site had to be planned, checked and authorised in conjunction with the relevant authorities. An escorted route was devised for the HGV transportation avoiding low bridges, weight restrictions and difficult manoeuvres to successfully deliver the equipment to site in the early hours of the morning. Craning operations to unload began at daybreak to ensure the remainder of the site operations were not compromised. 

Our extensive collaboration and proactive management of the supply chain and main contractor led to the successful delivery of the scheme and rolling handovers to the ingoing end users. The shell and core were completed in 18 months with tenant fit-out facilitated via early access at month 14.