Skanska carried out a capacity upgrade at Virtus London 4 data centre in Slough.
Originally built in 2014, the building consists of data halls over two floors with a mezzanine floor holding the primary switch rooms/UPS (uninterruptible power supply) rooms and pump rooms. Generators and chillers were accommodated in a gantry plant area at rear of the building, at ground and first floor level respectively.
Project
This was a high-risk, design and build project working in a fully operational facility. The upgrade required the installation and full commissioning handover of 12 new CRAC (cooling) units within the existing data halls, two new chilled water pumps, two new chillers, four new generators and additional mechanical UPS system.
Working in a live environment it was vital that there was no interruption to the existing critical services within the data centre.
With their deep understanding of data centres, Skanska’s experienced teams have the knowledge and expertise to deliver projects such as this. They are well versed in the meticulous program planning that is essential to ensure everything is correctly sequenced and that people and resources are in place at the right time.
Solutions
Before work began, our experienced project director and data centre planner developed robust preconstruction, construction and commissioning programs detailing key milestones. A master program was then developed incorporating all dependencies, to enable them to be continuously tracked.
Installing the volume of new equipment needed to carry out the upgrade, meant partially dismantling and opening one side of the plant gantry to allow new plant to be craned into position. We also extended the existing generator gantry to facilitate our generator install and a further future phase generator.
The generators, chillers, new pumps and CRACS were all commissioned and brought online without impacting the live/operational data centre.
Commissioning
To ensure a successful commissioning handover, a dedicated and highly experienced commissioning team were appointed from the outset of the project. There was also a commissioning tracker that highlighted all roles and responsibilities related to commissioning activities.
As part of the handover, our team worked alongside the commissioning manager to complete commissioning and witnessing of the installed systems. All the new plant followed the existing site wide asset naming protocol and utilised the same tagging procedure as the existing building system.
This right first-time approach delivered another successful data centre project.
