CASE STUDY
Putting together a data centre to act as the base for some of the University of Glasgow’s IT infrastructure required
Stothers Building Engineering Services to draw on all its electrical experience BY DAVID ADAMS
University challenge Company Stothers Building Engineering Services Established 1957
The company had worked with the equipment, technologies and services installed, but had never needed to integrate all of them in one project, including systems supporting the IT equipment and management of the building’s other systems, from lighting to heating, cooling, emergency and resilience systems. As Stothers’s electrical director John Wilkins says: “It’s not every day we come across such a challenging project.” PHYSICAL CONSTRAINTS The company won the contract in mid-2018 and work began that September. It later won an additional bid to complete a second phase in the data centre’s second hall during 2019.
IMAGES: PAUL ZANRE PHOTOGRAPHY
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ata centres are to the modern age what coal and steam were to the industrial revolution. They can also be hugely impressive facilities, on a technical level, if they have been constructed properly. The Saughfield Building at the University of Glasgow is one such data centre. Built on the campus as part of a £1 billion redevelopment programme, it consists of a ‘black box’ building and a separate generator house surrounded by timber batons. It houses the university’s ScotGrid servers (used for a collaborative project between particle physicists and computer scientists in the UK and at CERN in Switzerland) and the IT infrastructure running the university’s physics, astronomy and IT departments. There is space to accommodate any other systems the university may add. This state-of-the-art, resilient facility relies on electrical and mechanical infrastructures built, installed, commissioned and tested by NICEIC registered firm Stothers Building Engineering Services. Stothers was founded in Belfast in 1957 by Denis Stothers to provide maintenance services to local businesses. Today it has a £40 million turnover, more than 100 staff and offices in Belfast, Glasgow and Warrington. It provides a comprehensive range of electrical, mechanical, technical and design services across the UK and Ireland, including office and residential developments, prisons, hospitals and schools.
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