Case Study

KTS Completes the Final Stage of Long-term Project for Life Sciences Company

Client: Life Sciences Company

Location: Ipswich, MA

Technology: Infrastructure

Sector: Life Sciences

The Situation

A New England life sciences company on Boston’s North Shore had expanded their campus – adding a new building. The existing buildings were older, so they also upgraded their structured cabling infrastructure across the campus. They had reached out to KTS to partner with them to plan, design and install structured cabling, wireless access points and data rooms. The work was completed in 2023. You can read that case study here.

The final part of this campus improvement was to move the data center from the older Mansion building to the newly constructed Garden facility. Once the company was ready for this phase, KTS returned to move the data center to its new home.

The Work

When the construction work was complete, the campus data center remained in the Mansion building. The goal was to move the data center out of the Mansion and into the Garden facility.

The Garden facility data center was set up and ready to become the main data hub of the campus before the move began. All the data servers and equipment from the Mansion data center were moved to the Garden facility.

The fiber optic cabling in the Mansion was routed to the basement of that building where it was designed to connect the Mansion to the new data center. All the Cat 6 cabling from the Mansion was moved to the basement as well. What had been the data center on the first floor of the Mansion became a data closet. Three new racks and wire managers were installed to extend the active Cat 6 cable to the basement of the Mansion.

With multiple switches and servers, redundancies were incorporated into the data center with circuits running to the two data closets on the campus to prevent interruptions to the network.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was to minimize the disruption to the campus. To accomplish the move with minimal inconvenience, the work was scheduled and completed on a weekend. KTS worked closely with the company’s IT department to ensure that the move went smoothly.

KTS was able to test the equipment to verify that everything was live during off-hours to ensure there would be no issues on Monday when everyone returned to work. KTS also identified and labeled everything in the data center and data closets so that anyone who might need to work there in the future will have no trouble finding what they need. Read more about the importance of organized data closets.

Benefits/Impact

The Garden facility is modern and a more efficient environment for the data center. The data center is in a space designed to be a data center. It was purposefully designed with more space than the old one, allowing room for additional equipment, as needed, as the facility grows. This life sciences campus is set up to scale and support continued growth.