Infrastructure
The full domain, and the other capabilities within it.
Data Centre
The facility decides what the equipment inside it can actually do.
What this is
Data centre work covers power distribution and redundancy, cooling, racking and cabling, physical access control, and the environmental monitoring that makes the facility operable. It applies to a room in your building as much as to a hall in a colocation facility.
The constraint is almost always power and cooling rather than space. A rack with room for twenty servers and power for eight is a common finding, and it usually surfaces halfway through an installation rather than during planning.
When you need it
If more than one of these is true, this is usually the right place to start.
- Racks with physical space left but no power or cooling budget to fill it.
- Redundancy on paper that has never been tested by taking a feed offline.
- Cabling grown by accretion, where tracing a link means following it by hand.
- A new room, expansion or colocation move that needs designing rather than improvising.
What the scope covers
- Power design: capacity, distribution, redundancy level, and what actually happens on a feed failure.
- Cooling design matched to real heat load and to containment, not to nameplate figures.
- Rack layout and structured cabling with labelling and documentation that survive later changes.
- Physical security and access control, with an audit trail for who entered and when.
- Environmental monitoring for temperature, humidity, power and leaks, alerting into your existing channels.
What you receive
| Deliverable | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Facility assessment | Current power, cooling and space against actual load, with the real constraint identified rather than assumed. |
| Power and cooling design | Capacity, redundancy level, failure behaviour, and the growth the design accommodates. |
| Rack and cabling plan | Elevation per rack, cable routing, labelling standard, and the documentation that keeps it accurate. |
| Monitoring and runbook | Environmental sensors, thresholds and alert routing, with the procedure for each alert type. |
Reference architecture
A reference, not a template. Your estate decides which parts apply and in what order they arrive.
How success is measured
Targets are agreed with you before the work starts, and reported against for its duration.
- Power headroom per rack against the design load, measured rather than calculated from nameplates.
- Temperature at intake across the room, including the hot spots an average conceals.
- Redundancy verified by test rather than by design document.
Questions we are asked
How much redundancy do we actually need?
It follows from what an outage costs you, not from a tier label. Full dual-path redundancy is expensive and appropriate for some workloads; for others, resilience is better bought at the application layer across two sites. That comparison should be made explicitly.
Should we build a room or use colocation?
Colocation usually wins on power, cooling and physical resilience per unit of money, and it removes a facilities burden. Your own room wins on latency to local systems, on data residency in some interpretations, and where connectivity costs would dominate.
Is our cooling adequate?
Measurement answers that, and measurement at intake rather than as a room average. Rooms that look fine on average frequently have hot spots that shorten hardware life, and containment often gives more benefit than additional cooling capacity.
Does cabling really warrant a design?
Yes, because the cost is paid later. Undocumented cabling makes every subsequent change slower and riskier, and it is the reason changes get deferred — which is how estates fall behind on firmware and support.
What environmental monitoring is worth having?
Temperature at intake, humidity, power draw per circuit, and leak detection anywhere with water nearby. All of it should alert into the channel your team already watches, not into a separate console.
How disruptive is remediating an existing room?
It depends on whether the work touches live power. Cabling and monitoring can usually be done alongside operations; power changes need windows and a tested plan, and are sequenced so that any single step can be reversed.
Continue reading
Backup & Disaster Recovery
Backup design, immutability and tested recovery against agreed RPO and RTO — because an untested restore is a belief, not a capability.
Servers & Storage
Sizing, refresh and storage design driven by measured workload rather than by a vendor configurator — including what happens when a component fails.
Start with an assessment
The fastest way to a useful answer is a short, scoped look at what you already have.