Data Center Assessment and Modernisation Plan, Saudi Arabia

In 2024 UBIK assessed the design and the operation of a Tier III data center belonging to a financial institution in Saudi Arabia, and produced a prioritised modernisation plan. The client’s identity is withheld.

The question

A facility built to a Tier III objective years earlier faces three pressures at once: equipment reaching the end of its service life, capacity consumed by growth, and an energy performance set by the plant of its generation. The client’s question was how to address all three without interrupting a facility that cannot stop. The answer had to be an ordered programme: what to replace first, in which maintenance window, with which temporary measures, and how each step keeps the Tier objective intact while the next is prepared.

Scope

• Design assessment: the installed topology against the original design and the Tier objective, path by path and state by state, with the margin consumed by growth measured.
• Operations assessment: procedures, maintenance regime, monitoring, spares and the incident history against the design intent and the Uptime Institute Operational Sustainability standard.
• Obsolescence register: age, condition, support status and failure consequence for every major item of plant.
• Capacity and energy review: headroom by system, the part-load behaviour of the plant, and the efficiency gains available from controls, replacements and staging.
• Modernisation plan: the works ranked by consequence and sequenced into maintenance windows, with the temporary measures and the acceptance tests for each step.

What the work had to resolve

Every replacement in a live facility has to be made with the load supported by the other path, so the plan depends on the facility’s ability to run on one train for the duration of the works. Where the installed isolation did not allow it, the first steps of the plan created it. Where the operating procedures had drifted from the design, the plan restored them before any plant was touched, because a replacement carried out under an outdated procedure can interrupt the load.

Findings, the plan and the client’s protected information are not published.