Case Study: New Server Room Created for Jubilee Primary School and Lambeth Council

Server Room Environments have recently completed the design and build of a new server room for Jubilee Primary School and Childcare Centre. The project started with a site survey last summer to review a disabled toilet area that the school and Lambeth Council were looking to repurpose into a modern server room.

Server Room Environments won a competitive tender process run by Lambeth Council and were awarded the contract to deliver the new server room.

Project Challenges

Like most modern schools, Jubilee Primary School and Childcare Centre runs a complex IT network that supports administration, teaching, and security functions. The system had grown over the years to the point where a more secure and managed environment was needed to meet resilience, business continuity and insurance needs. Our Projects Team faced two key challenges relating to time and complexity when delivering the project.

The first was to complete the works during a February half-term and ensure that the new server room and IT system were fully operational for the school to open on the Monday morning following the Spring holiday. The second was the complexity of the works which included de-cabling the existing server cabinet and a rebuild into a new server cabinet. The IT included traditional Ethernet cabling with high-speed Fibre links to the outside world and the associated servers and routers. To ensure that the IT system could be rebuilt into a new server cabinet and detailed cable audit was conducted and a port-map created by our Projects Team.

Project Delivery

Before the project could commence, we completed a comprehensive Construction Phase Plan which detailed various aspects of the project covering Health & Safety, Permits to Work, Risk Assessment and Method Statement (RAMS) and project timetable.

The project ran over 10 days and started on a Friday night, working with the local IT support company to safely power down the school IT network. Over the first weekend the SRE Build Team stripped out the existing room. Plaster walls were removed to expose an old fire suppression system, pipework, and cabling. The systems were reviewed with onsite personnel to confirm the operational state of the exposed systems.

Once the room was stripped back to a shell, the build team moved onto the reconstruction phase. As part of this they added a new partitioned area, ceiling and floor, replastered walls, boxed-off areas, installed a drip tray, new fire door and frame, fire stopping and new air conditioner.

The project engineers then installed a new 39U server cabinet, built especially for the project. The cabinet was supplied with additional cable management and trays. This allowed the engineers to present a neater and more easily identifiable cable routing when building the IT network server and routers back into the cabinet.

The existing UPS were evaluated and found to need new battery sets due to their age. A decision was made with the school to replace them with a new CertaUPS 3kVA rackmount UPS and SNMP management card. The new UPS had a 3year warranty, provided a longer battery runtime and by using the existing PDUs was able to replace the two legacy UPS systems.

An AKCP sensorProbe+ environmental monitoring system was also installed into the server rack with a temperature & humidity sensor, airflow sensor for air conditioner monitoring, and water leakage detection rope into the new drip tray. The AKCP sensorProbe+ provided email alerts to key staff in the event of an environmental monitoring even within the new server room.

Access to the server room is controlled via a Paxton Net2 security system and the room is also connected to the building fire alarm system.

Project Completion

The project was delivered successfully, to budget and on-time. Handover was made by the Projects Team to the school on the Monday morning and the school successfully opened to welcome back pupils and teachers after the half-term period.

As part of the process, Server Room Environments signed up to the Social Fund operated by Lambeth Council whereby suppliers give-back a percentage of the project value to support local community initiatives.