New server room for a new London office
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My team has been spending a fair amount of time over the last three months preparing our new London office for its scheduled opening date of 18th October. Whilst the majority of our infrastructure will continue to reside in what our MD affectionately calls our ‘data centre’ in Marlow, needless to say we did need to deploy some kit on the ground in Moorgate.
We were considering building a small server room, but instead made the decision to use a Portable Server Cabinet from Kell Systems, something that we have deployed successfully for several customers as part of branch office implementations. This is perfect for our office, as it takes up only about 10% of the space of an equivalent server room – and is mobile should we remodel the office or move. Bearing in mind our current success, we could need to make the most of that space saving soon.
We will save £11,000 in capital expenditure on server room build costs, and have calculated that we will save in excess of £20,000 annually in cooling costs, as the Portable Server Cabinet’s forced-air cooling system is so efficient in comparison to traditional air-conditioning. Needless to say we see the associated decrease in our carbon footprint as an important bonus!
Chow Tamana, our IT Manager, is feeling positive about the change in strategy for housing voice and data systems at Softcat’s new regional sales office.
“The Kell Systems server cabinet is a real game-changer as it gives you the flexibility to locate the cabinet pretty much wherever you want within an office space.”
“We opted for the PSEi37 ComputerVault Pro RM model, as it will allow my I.T. infrastructure team to remotely monitor internal temperatures, humidity, cooling operation and security status of the cabinet from our head office in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. This particular model also provides the facility to reboot servers if necessary without having to go to site, which could be particularly useful for customers that have servers or systems that do not have built-in remote management”.
The PSEi37 will house the entire local office communications infrastructure, including our Cisco IP telephony system, router, switches and two HP DL380 servers. We are hoping for further regional expansion in the near future and expect to follow the same strategy – especially as we can link to and monitor multiple cabinets from our Marlow HQ. The PSE blends quietly into the office environment and can cope with all the cooling demands our equipment will throw at it!
Our Moorgate office will serve as a demonstration and training platform, as we continue to take the Kell Portable Server Cabinet to market, as part of our ‘office-in-a-box’ offering to our customers.