Jigsaw24: ICAS Cooling Racks Provide "No Brainer" Solution to Refurbishment Headache

In the summer of 2014 The Rack People were contacted by creative IT specialists Jigsaw24 regarding fitting out their new Soho, London premises. With space and time in short supply they needed a clever and cost effective solution fast.

Jigsaw24 were expanding and taking on a third premesis to support their London based customers - three floors in the heart of Soho. The building needed major refurbishment and Jigsaw24 wanted to transform it within a few short months into an Apple Repair Centre with a contemporary event space to showcase new products.

Jigsaw24 Entrance - London Premesis Dave Johnstone, Systems Manager, was tasked with planning and implementing the IT infrastructure. He needed a location to deploy two rackmount cabinets to house and cool the servers and comms equipment for the building. The most convenient location was the basement store room. Dave first considered building a traditional air-conditioned dedicated server room, but this presented several problems;

The Problems with Air-Conditioning

Space Restrictions - with building a new room and installing air-conditioning there would only be room for one cabinet
Time Restrictions - building a dedicated server room and installing air-conditioning would not have been achievable in time for the launch date
Impact - the installation of the air-conditioning pipework would have negatively impacted on other refurbishment tasks in the building
Cost - the price of installing air-conditioning would have pushed the project beyond the desired budget

Whilst considering these issues one of the product managers at Jigsaw24 suggested a solution that appeared to solve all of these problems - the ICAS Flex cooling rack.

The ICAS Flex cooling rack was the latest addition to The Rack People's range of cooling rackmount cabinets and had already proven popular with other customers such as the Medway Trust NHS Hospital.

After further consultation with Jonny Marris, Technical Manager at The Rack People, the deployment of two ICAS Flex cabinets transpired to be the ideal solution providing a total of 20 kW of thermal cooling and resulting in several significant advantages;

The Advantages of the ICAS Flex Solution

Space Saving - without air-conditioning units, pipework and additional walls, both of the cabinets could be deployed in the space available
Time-Saving - the installation timescales would be dramatically shorter and would fit with the launch date
Unobtrusive - the ducting work would not significantly interrupt or delay the other refurbishment projects, and Jigsaw24 even chose to leave the simple steel ducting exposed in the events room as it fitted with their contemporary urban design
Cost Effective - the new solution fell within budget
Resilient - the cabinet cooling systems would be powered by the UPS's which would ensure the cooling mechanisms would continue in the event of a power outage, a kind of resiliance that would have been prohibitively expensive to achieve with air-conditioning
Low Running Costs - the maintenence and running costs would be a tiny fraction of the air-conditioning option
Environmental Benefits - the environmental impact would be minimised both in terms of set up and long term energy usage

Dave Johnstone, Systems Manager, says, "The realisation that we didn't have to build a server room was a godsend given the time and budgetary pressures we were facing. There was scope for the second rack at the location we wanted. Delivery and set up happened much quicker which meant that the builders could get on with other things. It was a no-brainer."

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