Corporate/
Manufacturing
DATA CENTER CASE STUDY
Objective
A global auto-supplier headquartered in Europe, boasts a proud history of two and a half centuries in the automotive and aerospace sectors. With around 50,000 employees and locations in over 30 countries this organization is quite versatile with four main divisions: Aerospace, Auto Components, Metallurgy and Defense Systems. A requirement for a new North American headquarters and technology center in Michigan called for a world class data center to support engineering and manufacturing operations for multiple North American divisions.
This was not your typical data center build in that it would be supporting all of their North American locations, a secure 24/7 operation with zero tolerance for downtime was critical. To help meet these requirements, Advanced Facilities, Inc., was brought on board to assist with design and engineering efforts.
Solution
Before breaking ground on construction, Advanced Facilities coordinated with the client’s IT team to design and develop the new data center, including the space requirements needed. The design laid out was a result of dozens of cases where a focus on best-practices, low operating costs, and high availability were perfected.
“Tim and his team were great” said Jason in regards to Tim Amann, President of Advanced Facilities. “Not only did he guide us through the process of helping us understand our true availability requirements, his team then designed the facility to those needs. He was able to act as an intermediary with the architect and general contractor to ensure the combined project went smoothly.”
As expected, the construction phase of the project brought its’ own challenges in the sense that if this had been an existing building, the construction of the data center would have been a standard two to three month project. Since the manufacturing cannot happen without IT systems in place, Advanced Facilities would need to execute the project in less than half the normal time allotted.
Result
Several months after construction was completed, the region was hit by a very powerful wind storm causing several power outages in the area, including the new headquarters.
Jason described what took place to Tim Amann of Advanced Facilities. “We had a building catastrophe around 1:30pm. The building lost power for about 5 minutes. We ran on the generator for the minimum 30 minutes. The system automatically detected stable utility power and switched back once the minimum 30 minutes lapsed. All hands-off, I just watched it go through the motions.” Jason ended with, “It was great to watch. Everything went exactly as designed. It was a wonderful thing!”