Council spends £104,000 to keep data centre from overheating

Blackburn with Darwen Council has spent £104,000 to buy new dry coolers for its town hall data centre to stop it overheating.

The contract has been given to Manchester-based IT infrastructure specialists Sudlows Ltd.

A report announcing the award as the UK is subject to a series of heatwaves says: “A competition was carried out with nine companies being invited.

“Only a single response was received which was from the company that originally designed and built the data centre.

“This was not unexpected as they have the working knowledge of how the data centre operates and therefore had an advantage over other companies with this which cannot be avoided in a tender process.

“It is therefore recommended that the contract be awarded to Sudlows Ltd as although it was a single bid their quality response was excellent and having them perform the replacement considerably reduces risk to the council due to their existing knowledge.

“The council’s main data centre was built in 2011 and was designed to be a state-of-the-art data centre to fulfil the needs of the council in years to come.

“The facility has been well-maintained since it was built but the dry coolers at the facility are now 14 years old and are now end of life with the coils having now degraded which will lead to a loss of efficiency and performance.

“In the event of high temperatures this could in the future put the cooling system under additional strain leading to possible shutdowns.

“The dry coolers are an essential part of the data centre to provide cooling to the servers that are operating within the data centre itself which generate large amounts of heat and need to be kept cool.

“The data centre is a key element for delivering critical IT services in the borough.

“The department already holds a capital budget of £71,000 allocated to the replacement.

“The cost quoted to replace the dry coolers has come in at £104,000 and therefore a reallocation of £33,000 from the ICT earmarked capital reserves will be required to fund the remainder.”