Data Centres

Server floors, plant, standby power. High loads, redundancy and no tolerance for downtime.

What we take on

• Structural design for data centre buildings and extensions
• Floors for rack and raised-floor loads
• Foundations for standby generators, UPS and cooling plant
• Alteration and densification with the facility live

The load rises with every generation

Rack densities grow faster than buildings age. A server floor that suits today will be asked to carry twice the load in ten years. So we design with declared reserves and document them, so a later densification is an assessment rather than an investigation.

Redundancy concerns the structure too

Separate service routes, separate fire compartments, no common point of failure – that feeds back into risers, penetrations and compartment boundaries. It is a structural and layout question, not only one for the services design.

Alteration during operation

A data centre is not switched off. Working live means no vibration, no dust, no interruption of cooling. That determines methods, tools and phase sizes, and therefore belongs in the design.