i₃ Solutions Group is a specialised data centre MEP consulting engineering firm. We have fundamental goals - do exceptional work for our clients, be flexible, and be highly responsive to their needs. Out-of-the-box thinking and logic-driven, we support our clients throughout the data centre lifecycle. Our deep experience significantly increases our effectiveness working across the wholesale, colocation, cloud services, telecom, financial and public sector.

Sustainability

The greatest challenge facing the data centre industry is how to reduce GHG emissions to zero for all new data centres, and ameliorate CO2, NOx and SOx associated with existing data centres.

The main question is how to realise effective GHG mitigation with solutions that are commercially and technically prudent.

Our in-house sustainability analytics tool and comprehensive understanding of practical solutions enable our clients to achieve GHG mitigation and progressively attain their CO2, NOx and SOx emission goals.

Client requirements usually include considerations such as reduced carbon intensity, embodied energy, sustainability policies, risk, cost, time to market and other factors.

Ultimately the type of energy centre (e.g. standby, primary, energy trading, frequency response), and energy storage (e.g. BESS, diesel, biofuel, dual-fuel, CH₄ or H₂ blended, compressed air, flywheels, gas turbines or engines, SOFC or H₂ fuel cells etc) is determined by the client requirements and regulatory frameworks.

We work with a broad spectrum of sustainable technology providers and apply appropriate GHG abatement solutions in our data centre designs and sustainability reports.

Risk Assessments

We use qualitative and quantitative tools to identify infrastructure and operational risks and human risk factors. Each assignment we carry out is customised to the client’s requirements.

Risk factors are analysed based upon the required service level requirement. Typically we produce a prioritised Risk Register based on the following factors:

• Business impact severity
• Probability of risk occurring
• Risk mitigation solution
• Degree of difficulty in correction
• The risk associated with corrective action
• Cost to implement correction

Our in-house performance grading tool illustrates at a glance, the relative strengths and weaknesses of a system and provides a benchmark comparison with best-in-class performance indicators.

Reliability Analysis

Reliability Analysis is powerful tool when evaluating the most suitable block level system capacity and topology to meet availability and reliability SLAs.

Clients often want to know what the theoretical reliability and availability of the data centre MEP systems is.

Monte Carlo simulation with random component failures and reliability block diagrams determine the extent of interruption to mission critical service. Realistic dynamic system modelling cannot be done by standard direct analysis, e.g. FTA, FMEA and FMECA.

Site Acquisition and Asset Optimisation

Data centre capacity demand in the wholesale, colocation and edge data centre sectors is driving the acquisition of existing data centre assets.

Many of these sites have relatively low IT load densities and were originally designed with little or no consideration for sustainability issues.

Successful business models often involve reconfiguring former over-engineered enterprise data centres with more cost-effective topologies and increasing the IT load capacity. 

Clients require answers to the following questions:

• Will the data centre meet customer SLAs for the next 10-20 years?
• What will it cost to replace or overhaul ageing equipment?
• How can condition monitoring and reliability centred maintenance be applied to defer CAPEX without affecting reliability and availability?
• How can the IT load capacity be increased?
• How can rack IT load density be increased?

i₃ has a track record of maximising the potential of data centre acquisition targets. Two examples of this are:

1. A data centre seller believes the maximum IT load potential of his data centre is 12MW. With some lateral thinking, the buyer was able to realise 20MW.
2. An area constrained greenfield site was thought to have 20MW IT load potential. Our analysis demonstrated the data centre could realise 27MW.