Critical facilities management for Datum

Keysource was appointed by Datum, the business critical data centre provider, to deliver critical facilities management including all planned and reactive maintenance for its highly resilient and efficient facility at Cody Technology Park in Farnborough, Hampshire.

Keysource was appointed by Datum, the business critical data centre provider, to deliver critical facilities management including all planned and reactive maintenance for its highly resilient and efficient facility at Cody Technology Park in Farnborough, Hampshire.

Commissioned and operational in February 2013, Datum FRN1 was designed to deliver the highest levels of resilience and efficiency. With capacity for more than 1,000 colocation racks within a high security campus in Farnborough, FRN1 incorporates a pressurised free cooling design that delivers enhanced environmental efficiencies and supports high density computing to 30kW per rack as standard. Always on availability is supported by resilience in both design and operations underwritten by a 100% uptime SLA with helpdesk and remote hands services which are available 24×365.

Keysource was tasked with taking Datum’s new facility from construction into operation, including setting up all operational and maintenance processes, procedures and standards from scratch.

In order to most effectively meet client requirements, mobilisation was done during the facilities testing and commissioning stage. Keysource’s role was to take full responsibility for all critical engineering practices including planned and reactive maintenance, statutory compliance, testing and operational processes. These responsibilities underpin Datum’s commitment to uptime and the customers’ strict SLAs.

As a specialist Design & Build provider we understand the importance of tailoring the onsite maintenance processes with the design expectations of the installed infrastructure. By getting resource on board early we were able to work with the contracting team and testing team to shadow them through the testing and commissioning to support the mobilisation of the contract. The facility was designed with a 2N concurrently maintainable and fault tolerant infrastructure enabling work to be carried out in the live environment should an incident occur, without any downtime or impact to the customer.

The scope of the contract was to provide planned proactive maintenance, remote monitoring, reactive maintenance, operational and scenario testing, and statutory compliance for the site and all critical equipment. This included all electrical infrastructure from the HV down to the rack, the Flywheel and Static UPS systems, standby diesel generators, the ecofris hybrid cooling solution, complete fire alarm detection and extinguishing system and all onsite BMS and controls. On site critical FM engineering teams manage all site works and are supported by a central 24×7 technical helpdesk in order to minimise the impact of any possible adverse event to Datum and their customers.

Resources are planned to ensure all activities are scheduled and managed to ensure the facility is running at optimum performance as well as delivering statutory compliance as necessary. Remote alarms are monitored on site via the DC BMS to ensure non planned events are diagnosed and dealt with on a timely and safe way. Backed by a Keysource 24×7 remote monitoring service and supported by specialist contractors, all alerts are controlled and managed within the SLA and to minimise impact on any live systems. Training on the infrastructure and support by Keysource’s extensive in-house design and build technical expertise ensures maximum uptime and operational performance.

With such an in-depth knowledge of how the data centre is designed to operate, Keysource continually ensures that the Datum facility runs within its optimum design parameters, thus maximising efficiency.

1

Construction into operation

Fully mobilised contract from a standing start ensuring the facility meets all necessary standards to ensure the safe and resilient running of critical applications
2

Operational and technical resilience

Bespoke operational model created to match the requirements of both the facility and the customer
3

Flexible scalable support

On site resource combined with a wider pool of trained professional engineers and access to remote systems ensures maximum efficiency
4

Continuous Improvement

Feedback ensures future expansions build on the lessons learned, and deliver operation benefits and reduce operating costs

From the outset Datum’s vision has been to provide an outstanding colocation data centre service that would surpass our client expectations for resilience, efficiency, security and flexibility. Which meant we needed to partner with a specialist in the field with the expertise and the commitment to provide ongoing quality of support tailored to meet our exacting requirements.

Dominic PhillipsManaging Director, Datum Datacentres