Blog post -
How could Green Mountain design and build a Tier III certified data centre in only 5 ½ months
In autumn 2013 Green Mountain, accepted a challenge from one of our customers to build a new data centre in a different geographical area than our DC1-Stavanger data centre, within only six months. After a look at several available industrial areas for a data centre in Norway, we decided to go for Rjukan as our second data centre location. The municipality, the power company and other industries had worked with data centre plans for several years and knew what was important when establishing a data centre.
The next big question was which company in Norway was the correct partner for Green Mountain to design and build a data centre in the timeframe the customer wanted. Schneider Electric was selected as the main technical partner, and two companies were selected as the main building partners. The property division in Smedvig, the owner of Green Mountain, had the project management available in-house and Green Mountain could benefit from Smedvig’ s experienced team for building large and complex buildings.
Some of the highlights why we succeeded with the project:
- Involvement from Smedvig Property Division’s experienced team for large and complex building projects.
- Tight and strong commitment and project management from Schneider Electric and technical sub-contractors.
- Green Mountain`s own experienced team in technology and in operation of data centres.
- Experience and skills from building the DC1-Stavanger data centre as Tier III certified data centre.
- A customer with faith and trust in the Green Mountain project team and our ability to deliver on time and on quality.
- A municipality, local companies and people in the Rjukan society that wanted Green Mountain to succeed.
In addition, we had good winter conditions for outside work, for ground works, concrete slabs and mounting the building. The winters in the Rjukan area can give a lot of snow, wind and cold temperature, but the winter of 2014, we had little snow, little wind and good temperature. Because of the short time from start of the project to RFS date, we had to build a lot of the electrical and mechanical infrastructure in container-modules and ship to Rjukan. We had transport from France, Ireland and Italy with long and wide transport vehicles and as you all probably know, this may be a challenge in customs thru different countries in Europe. Thanks to tight, strong and very good project management from Smedvig and Schneider Electric, we did manage to receive the entire infrastructure on time at Rjukan. The local electrical and mechanical employees in the project also did a great job and worked day and night to reach the RFS date.
The project started in December 2013 and the customer was able to move in their racks one week in advance of contractual RFS date, only 5 ½ months later than the start of this project. We all gained a lot of experience and competence through this project and Green Mountain is using a lot of this experience in our building projects. Since day one of operation, all of our building- and customer projects have been delivered to our customers on time and with agreed quality.
Green Mountain with its project team and management has through this project, and all the other projects become a world leading company in delivery of data centre whitespace on time and on agreed quality. This is why we can deliver new white space to our customers in weeks and months instead of months and years.
