Engineering and Consulting Services

Critical Facility Consulting

With the explosive growth of the Internet and Personal Communications technology, the level of expertise required to design and maintain a critical facility is ever increasing. Today's global marketplace requires 7x24x365 high availability systems. Because of the enormous volume of customers utilizing single systems, system failures are unacceptable. Even a short duration outage, such as the ones experienced by several of the on-line auction sites, can cost companies millions in revenues. Power systems must be redundant. Grounding systems must comply with equipment manufacturer requirements, as well as mitigate problems associated with noise, transients, lightning strikes and power system faults. Each of these systems must be both reliable and maintainable.

As a prelude to commissioning, the critical facility consulting begins at project conception. We can provide expertise from site analysis, and soil resistivity testing; through grounding and lightning protection system design; to the final inspection of the installed product, and the commissioning process. We can also assist you in development of standard specifications, standard design details, and system design review. Implementation of the design review process guarantees consistency between individual sites, and conformity to preset standards.

Critical facility consulting is not limited to new buildings. Existing facility site analysis, troubleshooting, and existing systems improvement are all part of the approach to improved overall system integrity. Buildings, which house head-end, switching, data processing equipment, web servers, and other critical equipment, have special requirements that are different than those of a standard office building. Many times this type of critical facility is retrofitted into an existing office building or co-location site. Each facility has site specific requirements, which must be carefully integrated to comply with the client's standard specifications, equipment manufacturer specifications, existing facility physical limitations, as well as provide a functional installation.

We have provided these services for facilities including: data centers, switch facilities, fiber hubs, collocation, web hosting, and cable head ends for clients such as AT&T, BellSouth, Cox Communications, FiberNET, MCI Worldcom, and Motorola as well as various other clients.