May 13, 2025

Overview
A North American data center reached out to Grantek for help improving their operations through staff augmentation. It is typical in the data center industry for high staffing levels to be needed as a new data center is coming online, only for staffing needs to be lower once the facility is established. The data center was looking for help to assist with this near term staffing in their pursuit of improving the Electrical Power Monitoring System (EPMS) and Building Management System (BMS) at the facility. The initial integration of the EPMS and BMS were performed by another vendor during the first phase of the data center development. The data center realized that vendor was having difficulty completing that portion of the project. Initially Grantek was doing other work at the facility, the data center and Grantek established trust during these other engagements. When it became clear the other vendor would be unable to successfully integrate the EPMS and BMS, Grantek was asked to assist to get the project delivered on-time. For it’s efforts and success, Grantek was awarded all 5 subsequent phases of the site’s construction, and remediation of the first phase. The data center was also impressed with the local presence Grantek was able to provide via a network of local offices across North America.

Challenges
The EPMS and BMS the data center was looking to establish would be crucial to the control center for the entire facility. These systems would monitor and control the power distribution and cooling systems for the data center. Once Grantek was selected to integrate these systems for the data center, a road mapping session was convened. For their SCADA, the data center is an Ignition by Inductive Automation user. The data center also had existing Ignition templates. As an Firebrand Award-winning Inductive Automation Premier Integrator and Enterprise Integrator, Grantek was in a great position to develop Ignition screens and an integration to match the needs of the data center. This project also involved Grantek coordinating with the other trades to keep the schedule organized and on-time. During the development of the EPMS and BMS there were some problematic drawings which would create protocol issues if integrated per the drawings. With years of integration experience, plus the familiarity from the earlier engagement with the data center, Grantek was able to foresee many potential problems and remediate before they became larger issues. This allowed the data center to review, understand and approve needed changes to the protocol that was created by an earlier vendor, which prevented costly mistakes and kept the project within the planned timeline.

Solutions
The EPMS and BMS solutions Grantek integrated were deeply integrated to other aspects of the enterprise. With the established Ignition SCADA, Grantek’s solution was a valuable addition to the control room of the data center. This solution Grantek delivered is also used by the data center to connect the data from Ignition to the billing software they used to bill their clients. To do this, Grantek did a lot of testing to confirm accurate Energy Consumption and Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) – a metric in the data center industry that describes how efficiently a computer data center uses energy; specifically, how much energy is used by the computing equipment, in contrast to cooling and other overhead that supports the equipment. The data center mentioned this integration to their billing software, and single source of truth, corrected issues with previous systems that could have cost them millions of dollars in inaccurate billings to their customers. The client was very impressed with Grantek’s ability to troubleshoot and solve issues both on-site and remotely. During implementation and testing, Grantek also developed tools specifically built to help test their equipment. These tools were also transferable to testing other Grantek solutions built on Ignition, both at this data center and others. These Grantek developed tools also improved the project milestone transparency with the construction management Project Managers and their teams. The adaptability and proactivity of the Grantek team impressed the data center. Due to the success of the Grantek team at this facility, the data center engaged Grantek to work at 3 other sites in region, along with 2 other sites in different parts of North America.