Data Center
Infrastructure that runs whether or not you're watching.
Design, build, migration, and managed operations for colocation and on-premise facilities — including the hybrid estates that are not going to the cloud any time soon.
18
Facilities delivered
99.99%
Availability sustained
1.3
Typical design PUE
24/7
NOC coverage
Why facilities disappoint
Three assumptions that cost you a facility refresh
Data centre decisions are made once a decade and live with you for fifteen years. These are the assumptions that age worst.
Designed for a load that never arrives
Capacity planned against a five-year forecast, built on day one, and then run at a fraction of design load. Efficiency collapses and the capital is already spent.
- Cooling sized for peak, running at part load
- PUE measured once, at commissioning
- No modular path to add capacity later
Resilience on paper only
Dual paths that share a single riser, a generator that has never carried live load, and a failover nobody has executed outside the commissioning report.
- Single points of failure hidden in shared infrastructure
- Transfer never tested under production load
- Maintenance requires a full outage
Nobody knows what is in there
Racks accumulate. Asset records drift from reality, dependencies are undocumented, and the migration business case cannot be written because nobody can inventory the estate.
- Asset register out of date by years
- Power draw per rack unmeasured
- Dependencies discovered during the outage
Capabilities
The full facility lifecycle
From a rack in a colocation cage to a purpose-built hall, and the operations that keep either one running.
Design & build
Facility and white-space design sized against a realistic five-year growth curve rather than a peak that never arrives.
- Capacity modelling
- Rack and row layout
- Structured cabling design
Power & cooling
Redundancy topology, UPS and generator sizing, and thermal design — including high-density zones for GPU and AI workloads.
- N+1 and 2N topologies
- Hot/cold aisle containment
- High-density GPU zones
Migration & consolidation
Physical moves planned around dependencies and maintenance windows, with a rehearsed sequence and a rollback point at every stage.
- Dependency sequencing
- Rehearsed move plan
- Asset reconciliation
Storage & backup
Tiered storage sized to actual access patterns, with backup and archive that gets restore-tested on a schedule rather than assumed.
- Tiered storage design
- Immutable backup copies
- Scheduled restore tests
Disaster recovery
Recovery objectives agreed with the business, an architecture that meets them, and failover exercises that prove it on a real schedule.
- RTO/RPO definition
- Failover automation
- Annual live failover
Managed operations
Round-the-clock monitoring, remote hands, patching, and capacity reporting under an SLA with defined credits.
- 24/7 NOC
- Remote hands
- Monthly capacity reporting
Facility anatomy
Four systems that determine whether the lights stay on
Every one of these has to be designed for the concurrent maintenance you will actually need in year seven, not just for day-one load.
Power
Utility and generation
Dual feeds where available, generators sized and load-bank tested at commissioning.
UPS topology
N+1 or 2N chosen against the tier target, with battery runtime matched to start time.
Distribution
Independent A and B paths that do not converge in a shared riser.
Branch metering
Per-rack power measurement, so capacity planning uses data rather than nameplate.
Cooling
Containment
Hot or cold aisle containment, because mixing air is the cheapest efficiency loss to fix.
Free cooling
Economiser hours maximised against local climate data, not a generic model.
Part-load efficiency
Plant selected to run efficiently at day-one load, not only at design load.
High-density zones
Rear-door or liquid cooling provisioned where AI and HPC racks will land.
Space and network
Modular build-out
Capacity added in blocks as demand appears, deferring capital until it is needed.
Structured cabling
Containment and pathways planned for two refresh cycles of growth.
Carrier diversity
Physically separate entries, verified rather than taken on a provider's word.
Security zoning
Layered physical access with audited entry to cage and rack level.
Operations
DCIM and telemetry
Environmental data on the same dashboards as the workloads running on it.
Maintenance regime
Concurrent maintainability proven by doing it, on a published schedule.
Capacity governance
Power, cooling and space tracked as one budget with a named owner.
24/7 NOC
Escalation paths rehearsed, with runbooks written from real incidents.
We commission by proving it, not by signing it off. Generators carry live load, transfers are executed, and cooling is tested at both day-one and design load before the first production rack is energised.
Our approach
The decisions that outlive the build
Sizing
Designed for the growth you will actually have
Over-provisioned halls burn capital and run inefficiently; under-provisioned ones force an expensive retrofit in year three. We model against real telemetry and stage capacity so it can be added without a redesign.
- Capacity modelled from historic utilisation, not vendor sizing sheets
- Staged build-out with pre-planned expansion points
- Power density planned per zone, including future high-density needs
- Total cost modelled over the facility's life, not the build
Resilience
Redundancy proportionate to the workload
Not every system needs 2N. Blanket redundancy is how facilities become unaffordable. We tier the estate by business criticality and spend accordingly, with the trade-offs written down and signed off.
- Workloads tiered by measured business impact of downtime
- Redundancy topology chosen per tier, not applied uniformly
- Single points of failure documented and explicitly accepted or removed
- Failover tested annually against the agreed recovery objectives
Hybrid
Honest about what should stay put
We build cloud platforms too, which means we have no interest in pretending everything belongs in a facility — or that everything belongs in the cloud. Latency, data residency, and licensing usually decide it.
- Placement decided per workload on latency, residency, and cost
- Consistent operations across on-premise and cloud estates
- Network designed for predictable hybrid performance
- Exit path documented for anything we place on-premise
Placement
Where each workload should actually live
The interesting decision is rarely 'cloud or on-premise'. It is which of these five, per workload, and for what stated reason.
| Option | Best for | Capital profile | Control | Main trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Owned facility | Large, stable, long-lived load with regulatory constraints | Heavy capital, long depreciation | Total | Capacity decisions locked in for a decade |
| ColocationCommon default | Predictable load without the appetite to run a building | Operating cost, modest fit-out capital | High, above the facility layer | You inherit the operator's roadmap |
| Private cloud | Consolidation where self-service matters more than location | Capital refresh on a cycle | High, with platform overhead | You staff the platform team |
| Public cloud | Variable, bursty or geographically spread demand | Pure operating cost | Bounded by the provider | Egress and steady-state cost at scale |
| Edge | Latency-bound or bandwidth-bound processing near the source | Distributed small capital | High, physically dispersed | Operations across many small sites |
Owned facility
- Best for
- Large, stable, long-lived load with regulatory constraints
- Capital profile
- Heavy capital, long depreciation
- Control
- Total
- Main trade-off
- Capacity decisions locked in for a decade
Colocation
Common default- Best for
- Predictable load without the appetite to run a building
- Capital profile
- Operating cost, modest fit-out capital
- Control
- High, above the facility layer
- Main trade-off
- You inherit the operator's roadmap
Private cloud
- Best for
- Consolidation where self-service matters more than location
- Capital profile
- Capital refresh on a cycle
- Control
- High, with platform overhead
- Main trade-off
- You staff the platform team
Public cloud
- Best for
- Variable, bursty or geographically spread demand
- Capital profile
- Pure operating cost
- Control
- Bounded by the provider
- Main trade-off
- Egress and steady-state cost at scale
Edge
- Best for
- Latency-bound or bandwidth-bound processing near the source
- Capital profile
- Distributed small capital
- Control
- High, physically dispersed
- Main trade-off
- Operations across many small sites
Delivery
From requirement to running facility
Long-lead items are identified in the first fortnight, because they set the schedule.
- 01
Weeks 1–3
Requirements & assessment
Current-state audit, capacity modelling, and recovery objectives agreed with the business. Long-lead procurement identified immediately.
- 02
Weeks 4–8
Design
Facility, power, cooling, network, and security design issued for review, with a costed bill of materials and a staged build plan.
- 03
Build
Implementation
Fit-out and installation under a managed schedule, with commissioning tests at each stage and no dependency accepted on trust.
- 04
Cutover
Migration
Workloads moved in dependency order across rehearsed maintenance windows, each with a defined rollback point.
- 05
Ongoing
Operations
Monitoring, remote hands, patching, and capacity reporting under SLA — or a full handover to your infrastructure team.
What you get
What the engagement produces
Documents you can hand to a contractor, an auditor, or an incoming operations team without translation.
Design
- Capacity model with modular build-out plan
- Single-line electrical and mechanical schematics
- Resilience analysis with single points of failure named
- Total cost of ownership modelled over fifteen years
Build and commission
- Integrated systems test results at day-one and design load
- Generator load-bank and transfer test evidence
- As-built documentation reconciled against the design
- Asset register with per-rack power baselined
Operate
- DCIM configured with environmental telemetry live
- Concurrent maintenance schedule and procedures
- Runbooks and escalation paths for the NOC
- Capacity governance model with a named owner
Toolchain
What we work with
Vendor-agnostic across hardware; opinionated about the operational tooling that sits on top.
Compute & storage
Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Cisco UCS, Pure Storage, and NetApp, specified against workload profile rather than by relationship.
Network
Cisco, Arista, Juniper, and Fortinet, with leaf-spine fabrics and automated configuration management.
Virtualisation
VMware, Proxmox, Hyper-V, and Nutanix, plus OpenShift or Kubernetes where containers are the better fit.
Operations
DCIM, Zabbix, Prometheus, and Grafana, with environmental telemetry feeding the same dashboards as the workloads.
Engagement models
How data centre work is bought
Assessment first. A placement decision made without an accurate inventory is a guess with a fifteen-year consequence.
Estate assessment
Fixed fee
Four weeks, quoted up front
What you have, what it costs, and where each workload should actually live.
- Physical and logical asset inventory
- Power, cooling and space utilisation baselined
- Per-workload placement recommendation
- Fifteen-year cost model across the options
Design and build
Project
Phased, with commissioning gates
Facility design, contractor oversight and commissioning through to first production rack.
- Full design package and tender support
- Contractor oversight on your behalf
- Integrated systems testing witnessed and evidenced
- Migration waves planned and executed
Managed operations
Retainer
Monthly, 24/7 NOC
Day-to-day operation, maintenance governance and capacity planning under SLA.
- 24/7 monitoring and incident response
- Preventive maintenance scheduling and evidence
- Capacity forecasting and reporting
- Vendor and contractor management
Questions
What people ask before committing capital
Data centre decisions are expensive and slow to reverse. These are the ones worth resolving early.
Strategy
Should we still be building data centres at all?
Sometimes, and less often than ten years ago. Owning a facility makes sense for large, stable, long-lived load with real regulatory or latency constraints. For most organisations colocation covers the same requirement without the building. The assessment produces a per-workload recommendation rather than a single answer, because the honest answer is usually a mix.
We are moving to cloud. Why would we invest here?
Because migrations take years and the residual estate is rarely zero. Data with residency constraints, latency-bound manufacturing systems, and hardware with remaining depreciation all tend to stay. The work is usually consolidation — three facilities into one, or into colocation — rather than new build.
What about high-density AI workloads?
They change the design materially. Rack densities that assumed a few kilowatts do not accommodate modern accelerators, and retrofitting liquid or rear-door cooling into a facility designed without it is expensive. If AI capacity is plausible within the horizon, we provision the zone and the pathways now even if the racks arrive later.
Delivery and risk
Do you build it yourselves?
We design, specify and oversee. Construction and mechanical and electrical installation go to specialist contractors, tendered competitively, with us acting for you on design compliance, witnessing tests, and reconciling as-built documentation against the design. Being independent of the contractor is the point.
How do you prove the resilience claim?
By running the failure. Generators carry live load on a load bank, transfers are executed rather than simulated, and cooling is tested at both day-one and design load before any production rack is energised. A tier rating on a drawing is a design intent; the test evidence is what you actually bought.
Can you migrate us without downtime?
For most workloads, yes, with wave planning, replication and rehearsed cutover. Some legacy systems genuinely require an outage window, and we will say so early rather than discover it during the move. Where an outage is unavoidable, it is planned, communicated, and rehearsed in a staging environment first.
Talk to someone who has done the cutover.
Whether you are planning a new facility, consolidating three, or deciding what stays on-premise at all — start with an assessment.