Information technology professionals are known for speaking a language all their own. That lingo trickles down to the expert contractors working on mission critical projects, where it’s just as common to talk about microprocessors, redundancies and hot spots as concrete pours and electrical loads.
“More than anything, clients building data centers want to make sure they are working with a firm that specializes in this industry,” says Jim Stark, design-build manager for Electronic Environments Corp. (
EEC), Marlborough, Mass.
EEC developed that specialization during the last 25 years by focusing exclusively on mission critical work. Operating out of an 8,000-square-foot office, the firm initially targeted 1,000- to 20,000-square-foot data centers and used predominantly in-house labor to manage each project from start to finish. Today, EEC’s headquarters has quadrupled in size, with about 165 employees working to address the IT and telecommunication
s needs of Fortune 500 and Fortune 1,000 companies across the country.
“The service and maintenance side of our business provides a great deal of feedback for our designers and constructors,” Stark says. “We can look at a data center that’s been around for 20 years and assess what worked well in that installation and apply it to new projects.”
The soft economy has impacted mission critical work, but to a lesser extent than many other construction markets. Rather than dropping off completely, jobs have transitioned from brand new builds to upgrades and expansions of existing facilities. Co-location facilities also are trending upward because they house several tenants in one building, much like leased commercial office space.
“IT people can’t go multiple years with a spending freeze,” says EEC President Mike Kingsley. “They have to upgrade their equipment, so it’s typical to have a few slower years and then a three- to five-year building boom.”
Globally, the demand for mission critical space outpaces supply 2 to 1, according to Ron Bowman, executive vice president of mission critical construction for
Structure Tone, Inc. Anchored by about 1,300 employees nationwide, the family-owned company has built more than 22 million square feet of mission critical facilities during the past two decades.
Like many contractors, Structure Tone became involved in mission critical construction with a nudge from its clients—particularly financial institutions that need-ed data centers. “Over time, we morphed into leading thought providers. Users look to us for what they should be doing, why and for how long,” Bowman says.
Work is fairly abundant in the Texas market, which has ample land and competitive labor costs.
Structure Tone Southwest, headquartered in Dallas, responded to clients’ growing requests for heavy MEP upgrades by developing a group of about 25 employees dedicated to delivering mission critical projects. Though work has remained fairly robust compared to other construction sectors—mostly because of co-location and Internet company developments—many clients are changing the type of projects they pursue.
“They are trying to match capital budgets with IT needs,” says Joseph Cribbin, senior regional vice president of Structure Tone Southwest. “They are trying to make use of existing assets and do more upgrades and expansions rather than building new.”
Market DriversToday’s IT professionals are savvier than ever about how to do more with less—pushing contractors to do the same. For example, the processing power of microchips doubles every 18 to 24 months, which directly affects the size of data centers.
“The overall footprint of white space is getting smaller, but the overall requirements to power the servers and IT equipment is growing—in some cases, exponentially,” says Terence Deneny, Structure Tone’s vice president of mission critical construction. “Twenty years ago, you would see one to four servers in a cabinet; today, you could see hundreds of servers in a single cabinet.”
As a result, the biggest challenge facing clients, and their contractors, is how to deliver more power while dissipating the heat load. The simple answer is to introduce more cool air and force out more hot air, but the devil is in the details.
“Cooling solutions in Texas are unique to those used elsewhere in the United States,” Bowman says. “There’s a nuance to getting it right. Our job is to articulate the life cycle benefits.”
Another solution is to maintain a physical separation, such as walls or partitions, between the supply (cold) and return (hot) air flows. Rather than pumping cool air into a big room and hoping it offsets the heat load produced by servers, the physical separation ensures optimum cooling and efficiency within the data center.
Adding another layer of complexity, many owners want to increase IT equipment densities while improving their cooling efficiency and saving money—essentially greening these power-guzzling facilities. EEC recommends several best practices to improve airflow and cooling, including redistributing perforated floor tiles impacted by equipment changes, clearing airflow obstructions under the raised floor and plugging excess or oversized floor tile cable cutouts.
The firm also balances humidity levels through an ultrasonic humidification system, which creates steam-size mist droplets that evaporate quickly and require one-third the electricity of traditional steam systems. Ultrasonic humidifiers use 25 watts of electricity for every pound of mist generated (compared to 380 watts for electric steam generators and boilers), resulting in an estimated $7,100 in annual energy savings for a 100 pound-per-hour system.
“We also provide a Demand Based Cooling solution from AdaptivCool, which essentially is airflow management for the data center to make sure air gets where it needs to go, rather than just flooding the room with air,” Kingsley says. “We provide a better cooling solution to the client and save energy costs. That kilowatt payback allows the client to add more computing power without spending a lot of capital.”
The Demand Based Cooling system consists of a series of networked under-floor and overhead air-movers, server rack and temperature sensors, air conditioner controllers and environmental management software. Data center cooling efficiency typically is improved 20 percent to 40 percent, while simultaneously enhancing cooling redundancy and improving airflow.
In 2010, EEC installed its first Demand Based Cooling system for an insurance company that wanted to integrate new energy-efficient technology and eliminate its data center’s hot spots without making major changes to the existing infrastructure or affecting day-to-day operations. In addition to increasing the client’s IT load by 70 kilowatts, EEC achieved a 27 percent reduction in energy usage through the Demand Based Cooling system. Ultimately, the client is expected to save about $96,000 per year.
Structure Tone Southwest has had success greening mission critical operations as well. One financial services client called on the firm to build a 22,000-square-foot addition to its existing facility that connects to a new 118,000-square-foot Tier IV data center. Through an extensive preconstruction phase, Structure Tone Southwest identified ways to increase the building’s energy efficiency and reduce its environmental impact, including utilizing outside air economization to provide free cooling to the data floor, implementing a graywater and rainwater collection system, installing recycled content materials, using high-efficiency air filters and low-VOC materials, and specifying just-in-time delivery and prefabrication of major MEP components. It also designed the building to achieve at least 17.5 percent energy efficiency. The result: a data center that operates on a 7.5-megawatt power supply with 26,000 square feet of raised access floor that can expand to 50,000 square feet.
Sense of UrgencyMeeting future growth needs is a big part of the mission critical market. “We try to build facilities that clients can grow into over time by making the right infrastructure decisions upfront. We don’t want to disrupt functionality when making changes or upgrades down the road,” Cribbin says.
Service disruption is owners’ biggest fear and the reason many clients are embarking on facility upgrades during a down economy. Because IT systems need to run continuously, contractors must build redundancies into electrical and HVAC systems to reduce the probability of downtime. The more redundancy, the more space required.
According to Stark, redundancy has been a little easier to achieve in the last few years with the advent of new technology and modular systems. “With so many natural disasters in the last few years, people are finding it easier to reach into their checkbook and pay for additional equipment to provide the redundancy they need,” he says. “They cannot withstand being without power.”
That sense of urgency weaves its way into construction schedules, too. Speed to market is essential, with project timetables shrinking each year. Whereas it used to be acceptable to take two years to design and construct a data center, today’s clients want that time frame cut in half. Deneny reports Structure Tone recently designed and built a 20-megawatt data center for a financial institution in less than eight months, requiring a more integrated approach to project delivery.
“Because of the economic downturn, it can take one to three years to get a project off the ground,” Bowman adds. “But once it gets approved, speed is everything. The pressure is on to execute.”