Wellcome Trust, hurleypalmerflatt

State-of-the-art data centre design for the Sanger Institute

Project:

Genome Campus

Value:

£95 million

The Sanger Institute in Hinxton, Cambridge, is the world centre for Genome Research. The work of specialists on the campus plays a central role in the sequencing of the human genome and is the source of cures for many diseases.

With such accountability, the Wellcome Trust required highly powerful and resilient computer processing to avoid data loss. It invested £95 million into the development of six buildings, a four-hall data centre, wet laboratories and support facilities. hurleypalmerflatt was appointed to analyse and deliver inter-connectivity between the existing, new and potential buildings while enabling the ongoing activity of the institute.

We created a resilient backbone ring around the Campus that connected all buildings and had a central point of management. We planned fibre interlinks from the four, new data halls to the two wiring centres. The design is highly resilient, secure and has a capacity to ultimately handle in excess of 3,500 servers via 14,000 fibre cables routing to the wiring centres.

A system was developed for the intelligent management of fibre optic links so servers could be removed and reconnected with no risk of data loss. An intelligent patching system monitors connections in real-time as well as utilisation levels so extra capacity is not purchased unnecessarily.

Blown Fibre tubes have been incorporated throughout the site so fibres can be added or replaced without removing flooring or building fabric. Blown Fibre is the state-of-the-art future-proofing used mostly by large communications companies or on large campus-style environments.

The communications capability of the Sanger Institute now positions it as one of the most innovative and powerful research centres in the world.