Data center envelopes and elevated access floors.
A data center is a temperature problem with a building around it. Two of the things that problem needs are things D.W. Ross has supplied for decades: an envelope that holds a condition, and a floor you can run everything under.
This is the environmental and access-floor side of a data center. We are not the mechanical, electrical or IT contractor, and we will tell you plainly where our scope ends, which is usually more useful than a company that says yes to all of it.
The envelope, and the floor you work under.
Temperature-controlled envelope
Panel walls and roofs for space whose heat load is constant and whose conditions cannot drift.
Elevated access floors
Removable floor systems on pedestals. The floor comes up where you need to get underneath it, and goes back down.
Underfloor routing
The space beneath that floor is where power, network and communications infrastructure runs, and where it stays reachable.
A room that cannot be allowed to drift.
The panel systems that hold a freezer at a number are the same systems that hold a server hall at one. The difference is which direction the heat is going. We have been building envelopes that have to hold a condition since before data centers existed as a building type, and that is the part of this work we do.
Related: clean rooms and controlled environments and how a panel gets specified.
Panel envelopes, on our own jobs.
The photographs above are D.W. Ross panel work in temperature-controlled buildings. Data-center project photography has not been supplied, and we would rather show you real work from a neighboring building type than a picture of somebody else’s server hall.
Related figures, projects and articles from D.W. Ross.
Bring the heat load and the floor plan.
Room size, access-floor height and what has to run underneath it. Monday – Friday, 8:00 AM – 4:00 PM.