Boosting the Global Digital Infrastructure

The increase in digital demand has been critical over the last 12 months. The power of digital infrastructure has enabled the world to continue, but have you ever asked yourself how critical power is manufactured and delivered?

COVID-19 has been the catalyst for a lot of digital change and transformations over the last 12 months. Operational barriers were pushed to the extreme to make way for reactive digital change; adopting new technologies that have had to transcend the traditional ways of working we’d become accustomed to.

Mobile phones, tablets, laptops and a myriad of devices have become the core infrastructure to business, enabling us to host meetings virtually, attend networking events from afar and have conversations with colleagues, all without being physically present.

But with rapid growth in online communications, how did the industry keep up with demand? The answer in a nutshell: critical power and data infrastructure.

The Criticality of Power

Critical power solutions provide businesses with uninterruptible power and critical data infrastructure to ensure commercial operations run seamlessly. As a society, being quick isn’t good enough, downtime can create tremendous operational losses for businesses.

Anord Mardix specialises in the design, production and installation of critical power. Throughout the last 12 months, demand has sky rocketed for Anord Mardix as they continue to underpin the growth of digital infrastructure, ensuring the world can continue to turn in such unprecedented times.

Re-Defining Critical Power Infrastructure

With data centres fast becoming the foundation of digital infrastructure, Anord Mardix’s modular critical power solutions have really come into their own.

As the industry continues to grow from strength to strength, so has the popularity in modular designed solutions. Delivering solutions across EMEA (whether it be Power Pods or SKID mounted power solutions) the demand and reach continues to grow from northern Scandinavia through to southern Africa.

In the world we live in today everything we see feel and touch is ultimately translatable into a digital footprint. Something as simple as posting a photo online now relies more and more on the cloud; storing data, moving data, protecting data.

With data centre growth set to continue, Anord Mardix’s impressive and global client base has near doubled over the last 2 years as organizations demand more data retail space.

Anord Mardix explains they’re currently working on multiple hyperscale projects across two of their facilities in Lancashire to provide a data centre - spanning the equivalent of seventeen football pitches!

Overcoming Challenges Through Innovation

Unlike many businesses, the demand in the data centre sector remained strong throughout 2020 and as a result the company had to work out how to maintain output in a number of ways. First, in terms of sourcing raw materials despite the disruption to global supply chains and, secondly, continuing production while remaining within the various rules on social distancing. Both, in many respects, were challenging tests of management that the company not only passed, but exceeded in.

However, for many customers, processes will have changed, and Anord Mardix had to change with them. Pre-pandemic, clients would visit the company’s facilities prior to the products leaving the factory. “If we’re building a hyperscale modular data centre our clients need to see it working and test it.” Says James Peacock, CEO at Anord Mardix.

"We want to showcase our products functioning as they would onsite; testing our product in real time gives our clients the confidence that, when it leaves the factory, it’s as close to plug-and-play as possible. We’ve been reactive and effectively adapted to our client’s needs, that’s comprehensive engineering excellence.” This of course had to go virtual throughout 2020, and still is for many clients. “We introduced a lot of new technologies and processes over the past year so that, now, customers can do virtual factory tests. This means that clients can still have the full purchasing experience despite travel restrictions; they get to see their products in action and get a feel for the quality and product specifications they asked for”.

Looking Ahead To The Future

Whilst Anord Mardix as a business have adapted to the COVID challenges, maintaining client relations and utilising their technological advances, the demand on globally scaling will certainly present its own challenges.

“We recognise that with such global acceleration, we must continually seek sustainable ways of working to ensure we’re not only supporting critical infrastructure, but also the criticality of carbon reduction and sustainable sourcing.”

“We’re working with our hyperscale clients towards a net-zero carbon strategy to achieve carbon neutral practices, not only within our realm of control, but to lead the way within our full supply chain process. Sometimes it’s the smallest changes that make such a difference when applied at a hyperscale so we’re driving an all-encompassing strategy.

Anord Mardix have already led the way in their field by reviewing the logistical process around shipping their modular data centres, pioneering new practices to reduce operational waste.

“Our competitors are still building SKID based modular designs traditionally, delivering them under tarpaulins that require a large support frame. We’ve now developed a process where we use recyclable shrink wrap to encapsulate the individual modules before shipping without the use of the unnecessary frame, reducing the carbon footprint by half as we demolish the need for return shipping.

Ultimately, the growth in global dependency on data, data storage, and therefore Data Centre construction, has catapulted Anord Mardix into a spiral of growth – but it hasn’t been a journey without its challenges. Anord Mardix’s ability to think globally whilst remaining agile to respond to localized change has been crucial to the business’s compounding success. As the company looks to the future, their sights are set firmly on continuing with the quality product and services that their clients have become accustomed to - all whilst driving true sustainable change to their internal infrastructure and external business decisions.