One of the biggest challenges organisations face with their data centre is establishing when a refurbishment is necessary. The answer varies depending on a company’s circumstances. A refurbishment could be a short term upgrade to modernise components or to optimise its performance and minimise costs in the long-term. 

Once the design and build process is complete, mission-critical infrastructure has a typical lifespan of 10-15 years. Despite regular performance testing and proactive maintenance, essential power and cooling systems need to be replaced or upgraded every 8-10 years. This is a good basis to plan a refurbishment project on.

The unique challenges the refurbishment process poses include keeping the hardware operational throughout the project, the placement of equipment, and staff accessibility. Whatever the reason for data centre refurbishment is, the team working on data centre refurbishment projects needs to ensure all business operations continue with minimal downtime or disruptions to businesses services. 

To better understand when a refurbishment is necessary, it’s vital to consider what areas need modernising or improving. .

Energy Efficiency

Several years ago, data centre designs didn’t have the same focus on energy efficiency that exists today. Technology advancements such as Environmental Monitoring Systems mean that equipment such as air conditioning systems can be monitored in more detail helping maintenance providers optimise systems. This in return lowers costs for the business, prolongs the design life of systems and improves efficiency overall. 

Improvements in energy efficiency also contribute to your organisation minimizing your carbon footprint.

A refurbishment can update the original data centre design to ensure energy efficiency is optimised. In recent years, the biggest factor in the embrace of energy-efficient data centre build projects is power usage effectiveness (PUE). Tangible metrics like PUE and data centre infrastructure efficiency (DCIE) have encouraged organisations to adopt energy-efficient data centres and IT  systems as energy use can be measured and optimised more easily.

Critical Infrastructure Updates

Refurbishments offer the opportunity to innovate and develop systems that have previously been left untouched over the past years. For example, the critical backup power supply systems and cooling equipment can both be upgraded to improve data centre performance. It’s also vital to focus on enhancing scalability to ensure the equipment is scalable to match your company’s growth in the future. 

Mission-critical data centre network hardware is in constant use. If certain features of the data centre needs to be switched off, this may result in downtime. In some cases these periods can be avoided. However, when they can’t, the refurbishment must be professionally managed by a data centre expert to effectively mitigate any downtime and minimise any disruption to business operations.

Optimise Performance

A refurbishment should focus on improving and optimising how it assists business operations. There are two main ways a project can do this: enhancing the layout and upgrading the equipment. A design team should plan on how to make the most effective use of existing space, increase floor space, and improve the load-bearing capacity of flooring. 

The design and build of the refurbishment should also focus on the long-term future of the data centre. As well as equipment being scalable to cope with your company’s growth, the layout should have the capacity for future expansion. Enhancing security features and updating disaster prevention tools are also essential parts of an effective refurbishment.

Infiniti IT Refurbishments

A successful company, if they want to continue to grow and thrive, should set high standards for its data centres. This begins with an expert data centre installation followed by regular maintenance and eventually refurbishment. At Infiniti IT, our team are experts at innovating an original data centre design and build to enhance its performance and tailor its infrastructure to match your company’s requirements.

Upgrade your data centre and ensure it supports, scales, and optimises your business operations in the long-term; fill in an enquiry form to find out more.