About the Customer
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.
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.
The Challenge
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 UPS systems were no longer sustainable and there were a number of issues with the power distribution systems which were a cause for concern.
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.
The Solution
To address these requirements, the Councils Critical Facilities Team chose to replace the legacy AROS UPS systems at its Secondary Data Centre with new energy efficient BORRI B9000FXS 250kVA UPS Systems.
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 successfully deliver the installation over a 6-week period.
The new units were installed in a parallel N+1 configuration to provide maximum availability and reliability. During the works, a number of weaknesses and single points of failure in our infrastructure were also removed which has increased the overall resilience of the site.
The Benefits
Since the new units were installed, there has been a 10% drop in energy consumption which has provided costs savings of over £30k per year and contributes to the councils carbon reduction targets.