28th Floor Of The Shard Now Houses A Data Centre

A fully featured data centre has been built on the 28^th floor of The Shard tower in London, to serve the demands of South Hook Gas which moved its head office to the tallest structure in Western Europe in May.

Data centre and infrastructure management software (DCIM) integrator AIT Partnership Group installed the equipment and said the project was quite complicated given the height of the building.

Shard data centre

“Fitting out a data centre on the upper floors of a landmark building like The Shard with limited space, and difficult access  was particularly complex,” said Steve Bailey, Managing Director of AIT. “AITs design had to make the most of the tight space available and provide the level of redundancy required. We had to be very careful selecting components that we could install on the 28th floor.”

AIT used 47U racks which maximised the available space in the room, with environmental sensors used to measure power use and monitor the temperature and humidity in the room. The company was enlisted by Datrix, which provides managed IT services to South Hook Gas, wUK’s largest importer of natural gas.

The Shard is by no means the most unusual location for a data centre. IBM’s MareNostrum supercomputer is located in a data centre in a former chapel in Barcelona, while Google’s Finnish data centre is built in a disused paper mill in Hamina.

Ark Continuity has built a facility in the Victorian stone mines and Cold War bunkers under Wiltshire. Meanwhile, Facebook is ignoring the old, and making its latest data centres from pre-assembled ‘flatpack’ modules.

Try our super-duper supercomputer quiz!