New Look Retail

New Look Retail’s head office is in Weymouth, Dorset. However, New Look acquired over 600,000 square feet of offices in London’s trendy West End. To support the various activities at the new offices, a small data centre was required.

EPI Solution

EPI worked with CB Richard Ellis to design and build the datacentre navigating the various challenges constructing a data centre in the middle of the West End presented.

Result

An IT and Communications infrastructure that supports all of New Look Retail’s requirements.

Client Profile

New Look opened its first store in 1969 growing to over 200 by 1994. Since then, the brand has continued to expand onto almost every UK high street and also has presence in Belgium, France, the Republic of Ireland, Dubai, and the United Arab Emirates.  

New Look provide fashion clothing to the high street and has a significant focus on the teenage market.

The Business Challenge

Initially, New Look Retail examined a remote hosting solution for their IT services; however, this was dismissed for a number of reasons. Firstly, New Look Retail did not want their core IT systems to be reliant on third party WAN links. Secondly, the size of files used within the Design studios also precluded the use of external WAN links for the majority of data transmission.

New Look Retail also had a finite amount of time to completely renovate the building to take office space, studio space and IT and Communications space. The task was to achieve all of this concurrently.

Mark Wilson of New Look states: “We had our work cut out as we had to deal with a number of professionals and contractors all working in tandem to achieve the goal of moving New Look into the building”.

EPI Solution

Whilst investigating options for the IT requirements at the new location,
EPI helped New Look to design and build the data centre for the new headquarters that will house business critical server and communications hardware.  

Mark Wilson states: “EPI has already build two of our datacentres at our large distribution facility in the Midlands and we were happy with what they had achieve there. We were keen to replicate the standards set in the midlands here in London”.

EPI built a 60 minute rated 4 rack modular data centre at New Look’s London headquarters on Mortimer Street. The floor area is around 28m².  The walls and ceiling are constructed of pre-formed panels comprised of steel faced mineral fibre insulated panels.  The room is cooled by two Airedale Easicool air conditioning systems in a down flow N+1 configuration. A complete fire suppression system using IG-55 was also installed along with a UPS system also in an N+1 configuration which supplies the four IT racks. The air conditioning systems have a dedicated UPS supporting their operation.

The Result

New Look Retail currently have a purpose built datacentre up and running at the London corporate offices.