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About Surrey County Council |
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Surrey County Council (SCC) is a leading South East local authority providing education, social services, environment, transport, library, community and emergency services with over 200 locations across the County and employs over 23,000 staff. Local partners include 11 district councils, health, fire, ambulance, police and voluntary services as well as central government departments and agencies. The Council provides services to over one million residents with a budget of over £1billion and is the fifth most populous non-metropolitan Council in England. Surrey has the highest GDP per capita and is home to more organisations and company headquarters than any other County in the United Kingdom. The Council operates 2 dedicated, purpose built, state of the art data centres which provide secure hosting space, application and infrastructure services to over 8000 users across the Councils internal business teams and partners, as well as external partnerships for both public sector and private sector clients. These data centres are based within the County and are solely owned and operated by the Council. |
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The Challenge |
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In local government, there is pressure to cut costs and reduce carbon footprints. SCC is facing exceptional financial challenges as a result of cuts in government grants and an increase in demand for their services. The Council’s secondary data centre facility had not had any significant investment for more than 20 years and the legacy air conditioning infrastructure was no longer sustainable with frequent failures a major cause for concern for the Council. The Councils Critical Facilities Team who manage the Council’s data Centres, needed to provide a reliable and stable environment to support the IT infrastructure for the Councils critical business services and reduce its operational costs. |
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The Solution |
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To address these requirements, the Councils Critical Facilities Team chose to replace the legacy air conditioning infrastructure at its Secondary Data Centre with new energy efficient Airedale SmartCool systems. The SmartCool systems provide market-leading cooling with high airside efficiency. The systems are highly versatile, precision air conditioning units, which are ideally suited to data centres running low, medium, and high-density applications. They feature inverter driven compressors, which deliver a reduced footprint, fast start sequence, and benefit from less cool down in the event of a power failure. |
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The Benefits |
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Since the new units went operational, there has been a 15% drop in the energy consumption at the site and further reductions are expected as the performance of the new units is fine tuned. The operating environment within the data centre has also improved significantly which has had a positive impact on the performance of the IT infrastructure. These improvements will provide ongoing cost savings through energy efficiency and help to reduce the Councils carbon footprint. They will also enable the Councils Data Centres to provide cost effective, reliable and secure environments that have laid the foundation for improvements in the Councils services and create opportunities for partnering with other public sector and private sector organisations. As a leader in the public sector, Surrey County Council is now actively offering solutions based on its state of the art data centres in partnership with other public sector organisations Our technology partner Saradan Design & Management Limited, a specialist in the design, project management, fit-out and maintenance of critical facilities with over 20 years of experience, worked alongside our facilities management partner Kier Group PLC to deliver the installation over a 6 week period. The works were successfully completed without any impact to the business critical and highly sensitive services and systems hosted at the data centres. |
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