Introduction

Torridge District Council is a rural council in the north west of Devon. The coastline, historic towns, nature reserves and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty are valuable assets; as quality of life and environment becomes an ever more important factor in choosing where to live it is likely that population growth in Torridge will continue, with many functions supported by the district council.

In January 2015 a transformation programme was proposed and approved by Torridge District Council’s councillors. With a growing population, the council wanted to be able to offer smoother processes and improved customer service for a greater number of residents – all from one single location. The existing council buildings were spread over four sites, so bringing all staff and services together into one building was deemed to be a priority.

Solution

Torridge District Council’s Business Transformation Manager Roger Bonaparte began working on the improvement project in January 2015. He invited data centre businesses to tender for the work to relocate the council’s data centre to a different location. A number of organisations went to visit Roger and he was soon able to narrow them down to just four, one of which was INFINITI who had taken a keen interest in the project since the beginning. 

In the summer of 2015, after reviewing all the tender documents, Roger and the team at the council decided that INFINITI was the perfect organisation to take the work on due to their excellent balance of quality versus cost. According to Roger: “INFINITI’s bid aligned to data centre best practice and the Government’s ‘Green IT Strategy’, as well as our own timing and flexibility requirements.” 

Infiniti IT's Managing Director Peter Sands managed the project and further to approval of a pre-construction document by the council, work began in August 2015. This included: Preparation In the Riverbank office building the INFINITI team stripped the proposed data centre room of all existing cabling and phone lines. They then removed any windows and replastered the walls to make the room more secure and unobtrusive. 

The floor was also improved with anti-static flooring and a new sturdy door was installed. Ordering and receiving deliveries INFINITI began to order all the necessary parts to make the project a success, including the UPS and computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units. The council made it clear that deliveries were to happen at certain times on specific dates, and Peter made sure this was the case.

Result

The new data centre is now fully up and running in the new location. It has the capacity to support new communication links and modern hardware that requires an up to date network cabling infrastructure. It also has a secure door entry system. The council is now able to accommodate staff in this single location as they progress with the transformation programme. As a result staff are able to offer an improved level of customer service to residents because of the new back office infrastructure. 

The fact that the data centre design and build deadlines were adhered to has meant the transformation programme is still on track; a critical success factor of the entire programme was the data centre construction. “Now we have modern infrastructure cabling, redundancy with the UPS, and air handling units,” says Roger. “And everything is monitored remotely by INFINITI so we benefit from constant support too.”