Technical insight · Technology

A technology tenancy is an office with a technical building inside it.

Technology tenants tend to need two buildings in one lease: a normal workplace, and a set of rooms with requirements that a commercial tenancy was never sized for. Server and comms rooms, test benches, prototyping and light assembly, secure areas, and sometimes a laboratory.

The constraint

The workplace half is straightforward. The half with the equipment in it is where the programme and the services capacity actually go.

Those rooms bring dedicated cooling, dedicated power, containment, acoustic separation, vibration and access control. Each of them draws on base building capacity that has to be confirmed in writing, and each of them carries a lead time that the workplace half does not.

One lease, two buildings

  1. The workplace half

    Open plan, meeting, collaboration, end-of-trip, front of house

    Large area · Light services · Short lead time

  2. The technical half

    Comms and server rooms, test benches, secure areas, labs

    Small area · Heavy services · Long lead

  3. Base building capacity

    Cooling, riser, condenser locations, structural allowance. Confirmed in writing, before design.

Rarely the constraint

A well-understood fitout with known trades and ordinary lead times. It follows the other half.

The small half sets the programme and draws on capacity the tenant does not own. That is why we ask the building manager the hard questions before the layout is agreed.

Sizing the room

Start at the equipment, finish at the room.

Nearly every comms room problem we are called into started with someone nominating a room on a plan before anyone had added up what was going into it.

Sizing a comms room, in sequence. Start from the equipment the client will actually install, which gives a heat load in kilowatts. The heat load sets the cooling, the cooling needs a condenser location which is a landlord question, and the equipment plus the cooling together set the electrical load. The electrical load has to be reconciled with the riser capacity, and only then is the room size and containment resolved. Skipping to room size first is the common error.

Size the room last, not first

  1. 1

    Equipment list

    from the client, not assumed

  2. 2

    Heat load

    in kilowatts, at capacity

  3. 3

    Cooling

    dedicated, not the floor system

  4. 4

    Condenser location

    a landlord question, always

  5. 5

    Electrical load

    equipment plus cooling

  6. 6

    Riser capacity

    confirmed in writing

  7. 7

    Backup and UPS

    runtime the business needs

  8. 8

    Room and containment

    the answer, not the question

The common error is starting at step eight. A room is nominated on a plan, the equipment arrives, and the cooling has nowhere to reject heat to.

The condenser location is a landlord conversation and it is the one step in this chain that a tenant cannot solve on their own.

The condenser location is the step a tenant cannot solve alone, and it is the one most often left until the equipment is on site. We put it to the building manager in week one.

The technical half

What each of those rooms actually needs.

  • Dedicated power

    Its own circuit, often backed up, sized from the equipment rather than from the floor area.

  • Dedicated cooling

    A high heat load in a small room, with a condenser that needs somewhere to reject to.

  • Access control

    Tied to the base building system, with cabling segregation where a customer requires it.

  • Containment and growth

    Cable containment sized for what comes next, because the second fitout costs more than the spare tray did.