White Space Consulting

The company provides a multi-discipline consulting engineering service for technical advice, reporting, design and project oversight. DFL are able to offer this service to clients in most parts of the UK, Europe, Russia, UAE and Far East. We have built up a wide base of expertise and experience and are happy to engage with clients to resolve difficult power and cooling issues and provide practical and achievable end results.

We provide the following consulting services:
  • White space planning and construction concept designs.
  • Power capacity and planning for existing and new computer rooms and data centres.
  • Maximum capacity and load calculations of the elemental parts of the electrical system.
  • Advise on the total projected electrical load.
  • Predict normal and peak conditions during normal operations of the data centre
  • UPS autonomy calculation and integration of back-feed prevention, by-pass prevention, neutral-earthing and system walk-in characteristics.
  • Provide designs for the installation of emergency generator plant and ability to service the load with specific focus on step acceptance relative to load as well as redundancy of operation and dual path availability.
  • Redundancy checks on the entire system from source to final device.
  • Develop a description of a requirement Protection and Discrimination Studies.
  • Produce an evaluation of upgrade potential.
  • Carry out lighting assessments and illumination levels within the white space.
  • Evaluate and report on short circuit protection and fault ratings on switchboards as well as a compatibility check on the use of different (if applicable) types of circuit protection devices.
  • Determination of total cooling capacity, net cooling capacity and spare capacity within both new and existing data centres..
  • Calculate and predict cooling delivery, air volumes, temperatures for the entire data centre operating envelope set against current ASHRAE specifications and tested using CFD modelling engineering.
  • Psychometric analysis and plotting of the operational envelope relative to critical parts of the space.
  • Determination of maximum cooling capacities and air flow and with regard to the potential upgrades to either cold or hot aisle technologies and using in-row cooling or adiabatic solutions.
  • Consideration of pipe work arrangements, path redundancy and failure scenarios.
  • Design of the motor control system and the way in which the plant operates including efficiencies of operation and inductive loads.
  • Design and specify software control and systems in operation.
  • Specify plant sequencing and efficiency of operation.
  • Map expansion potential and the amount of free space that is available.
  • Undertake full design for fire detection systems including type, supplier, supportability, design validation and wiring arrangements.
  • Provide designs for fire suppressions system including calculations for gas concentration, standards that apply, the operation of the system, compliance to HSSE, gas extraction, cause and effect, pressure relief venting and pressurisation plant.
  • Design and specify early warning fire detection system such as HSSD or VESDA.
  • Specify the operation and location of the early warning systems will be integrated into the design.
  • Produce figures for PUE effectiveness and the overall operation of the facility in terms of energy relationships and result.
  • Compile and schedule DCIM points and building management systems including alarms and monitoring.
  • Produce tender drawings showing architectural, building work, mechanical, electrical, fire, control, and IT migration arrangements.
  • Assemble single line schematics for power and cooling as well as control diagrams, LV switchboard arrangements, load schedules, wiring diagrams, monitoring arrangement, battery systems and control wiring schematics.