British construction services firm ISG has been awarded a £7.6m ($9.82m) contract to build a data center for the Wellcome Trust’s, a biomedical research charity based in the UK. 

The facility is to be built in the Sanger Institute’s Genome Campus at Hinxton, 13 miles from Cambridge, where the trust already has three data centers. The existing centers will be given greater resilience in the form of a DRUPS (diesel rotary uninterruptible power supply) and high voltage infrastructure, as will the newest addition, which will consume a maximum load of 1.2MW.

Gaining ground

Although ISG is a generalist construction company, it has built a lot of data centers. Among others reported here, it took on a £75m ($96.85m) contract to build a facility in the North East of England, then it built another £100m ($129.20m) site for financial services group Santander, and in 2015 it received a €200m ($237.58m) in contracts for two European projects.

Danny Blakeston, managing director of ISG’s engineering services, said: “The demand for additional computer power and storage capacity, combined with the certainty of mechanical and electrical systems resilience are key drivers for Wellcome Trust, and our first project at the Genome Campus will help address these core requirements.

“This is a challenging and highly complex scheme in a busy, live environment, where maintaining continuity for critical infrastructure throughout the project duration is a pre-requisite.”