Interserve

Business Challenge

Interserve is a leading Facilities Management firm. On winning two large government contracts, there was an immediate requirement to quickly set up a data centre enable the IT systems to service these contracts.

EPI Solution

EPI was called in to implement the design and build of the proposed data centre. EPI had to create innovative solutions based around very tight timescales.

Results

A secure and resilient IT environment with the capacity to grow quickly when required.

Client Profile

Interserve is a service management organisation operating in the public and private sectors in the UK and internationally. They offer advice, design, construction and facilities management services for various infrastructures and provide a range of plant and equipment in specialist fields. They manage and maintain a number of building infrastructures such as hospitals, schools, offices, shopping centres, airports, and prisons. They also offer service integration solutions to various government organisations.

The Business Challenge

As a Facilities Management company, Interserve’s remit with the contracts won was to provide call centre and IT services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Quickly designing and implementing the infrastructure to achieve this was a challenge. Warren Stevenson – Head of IT Services states: “As a company, we needed to move quickly to service these contracts and we needed a company that could respond to our timescales. EPI had worked for me in my previous role and I could think of no other company that could react so quickly and yet produce a service of the highest standard”.

Warren Stevenson continues: “The focus for Interserve was threefold: Speed, future growth and fit for purpose”.

EPI’s Solution

EPI immediately began working on a design for Interserve. Interserve’s IT Project Manager, Gary Marsh says: “Two words come to mind when describing EPI’s work ethic: Can do. Nothing seems to be too much of a challenge for them; they always seemed to draw on experience or innovation to create solutions during both the design and the build stages”.

EPI built a 60 minute rated modular data centre at the Interserve site in Redditch with an initial design brief to support eight communications and data racks but to allow for future expansion to sixteen.

The data centre measures circa 10m by 7.5m with walls constructed of steel faced mineral fibre insulated panels. A partition wall was installed in the centre of the room to ensure cooling and fire suppression was limited to the area in use with the eight racks.  When additional racks are required, EPI have designed the data centre to allow the partition wall to be removed and additional cooling and fire suppression to be installed.

The room is cooled by two Airedale Easicool air conditioning systems in a downflow N+1 configuration. Power is supported by 2x 60kVA UPS, again in an N+1 configuration. A complete fire suppression system using FM200 was installed to protect the room along with an access control system that is fully integrated with Interserve’s other site in West Bromwich.

Once the data centre was built, Interserve also turned to EPI for the installation of the data cabling to link the eight installed cabinets. This comprised of 48 Cat6 cables and a number of fibre cables. All data cabling was installed to the various British standards for data cabling.

Result

The datacentre was build in time for the Interserve Service Centre launch conducted by Interserve’s Chief Executive, Adrian Ringrose. Warren Stevenson says: “Interserve now have an infrastructure that can support our National Service Centre as we grow”.