Introduction
Connecting retailers with over 220 countries and territories across the globe, P2P provide distinctive delivery services.
The Challenge
The entire company was forced to vacate and relocate into a new premise against very tight timescales.
Although the building was adequate to allow the company to continue to physically provide their services, their IT Data Centre was in a poor state and also contained some of the old tenant’s infrastructure. As a result, this meant the DC needed to be remediated and brought up to a better standard.
After a detailed survey was carried out, Technimove were able to gather key information to enable a clear solution.
The DC located on the first floor housed all IT hardware including; Telco kit, servers, storage and all user data ports across the warehouse and offices, back to the patching cabinets. The AC units mounted in the false ceiling had previously leaked and meant that some of the ceiling tiles had crumbled and broken away from the grid. The walls were covered in wallpaper, displaying holes from a previous shelving unit and other damaged areas in need of repair.
The room was approximately 6.5m square and raised on a false floor of a void of only 17cm. There were 8 cabinets in the room, along with storage cupboards containing IT equipment and a workbench along the wall. All power distribution boards were located on the rear wall. The room had backup power provided by an Eaton Powerware 9355 UPS system, which provided 30Kva of back-up power, which was out of maintenance support and not operational. The bypass switch was located behind the UPS in an open corridor leading from the main warehouse. This was fed from the site transformer using a 100A 3P isolator.
Across the 8 racks, one is occupied with IT servers and storage, 2 cabinets with core switches & network equipment, plus 2 cabinets with structured cabling patch panels. The remaining cabinets were empty.
The customer required the DC to be remediated to a newer and more environmentally efficient room, with the walls and ceilings repaired and a new rack UPS system installed. All redundant equipment, structured cabling and patch panels were to be removed to reduce the number of cabinets in the DC.
There was also the requirement to remove the redundant UPS and re-run a new SWA cable, to provide a N+1 system.
The Solution
Technimove attended site to carry out a deep discovery survey of the current environment of both the DC room and UPS units. The team created a bespoke proposal, capturing the comprehensive scope of works, including a detailed breakdown of tasks and timescales.
The project scope included:
- Filling, repairing and painting of the DC walls.
- Replacement of false ceiling tiles and repair of the leaked hose condenser pipe connection
- Removal of old UPS and re-connection of new Submain cable to DC. Bonding of all cabinets to earth bar.
- Make live and re-label distribution board back to each cabinet.
- Removal of redundant ports and patch panels, consolidation into one cabinet and re-patching.
- Disposal of empty cabinets and redundant IT devices.
- Audit and migration of all P2P IT equipment into HP racks.
- Installation of new cabinet UPS’ and splitting of device power between feeds.
- Creation and submission of EICR form, upon work completion and sign off.
- Project Management throughout the process, communicating updates of all tasks back to the client.
Technimove’s Input
The Technimove Project Manager was engaged throughout the entirety of the project as the client’s single point of contact for escalations, keeping in constant communication via e-mail and site visits. The Technimove PM worked closely with suppliers on time-frames, planning outages and change windows during the power shutdowns.
Technimove undertook final checks before handing the equipment back to the client for the customer’s technical, business unit and end-user testing to commence.
The Result
The final solution was a clean, tidy and workable environment, with all redundant equipment removed with just P2P infrastructure housed within the DC.
With a change of scope during the project, and to maximise the potential space of the DC, it was agreed to migrate all devices into the spare HP racks, rather than the old COMMS cabinets.