Critical Facilities Services

Data centers—one size does not fit all

Critical Facilities Services are consulting, design and assurance services for new or retrofit data centers. Our experts combine design engineering and architecture with IT expertise. They design and build data centers to meet changing business needs with lower facilities capital and operating costs.

As businesses enter new markets and seek new ways to connect with customers, the demand for new IT services escalates. To keep up, IT implements flexible infrastructure like blade systems, storage-area networks and virtualization, all matched carefully to business needs. But there’s nothing flexible about that old data center—one size fits all. Every application gets the same facility services at the same cost.

We design and build modular, multi-tier data centers. Our approach helps align IT, facilities and line-of-business organizations to match data center capacity and flexibility to business needs. That means lower cost and more room to maneuver down the road.

Not your same old data center

The data center for converged infrastructure and cloud computing will be different from a traditional data center. Cloud computing requires that IT and Facilities can no longer take their own separate paths.

In terms of resiliency, for cloud computing you need a facility that offers a flexible combination of redundancy and capacity to support IT processing. You want a high density infrastructure with efficient use of space, power and cooling for the pooled arrays of server, storage and network equipment. Instead of a redundant, highly fault-tolerant architecture, you need structured cable and power systems with flexibility to implement upgrades and configuration changes.

When it comes to orchestration, cloud computing demands an integrated operational management framework that includes the data center facilities. You want a variable, scalable, multi-tier infrastructure, driven by SLAs and with ability to alter capacity as needed to optimize CAPEX and OPEX. In particular, your facility should provide standardized power configurations that allow globally sourced IT equipment to be redeployed.

And while efficiency is always important the facility needs to provide green power and cooling that responds dynamically to the widely varying processing loads found in cloud computing.