Three years inside the group data centre estate of a global telecom operator: keeping 24 European sites healthy, and retiring what no longer earned its space.
Vodafone Group Data Centre (via BIP Consulting) · PMO for Data Centre Management, and PM on individual initiatives · 2017–2020
A group data centre estate is judged on two things at once: whether it keeps running, and whether it still deserves the space, power and cooling it consumes. Answering the second question is unpopular. Every rack has an owner, every building has a history, and the saving only appears once the last workload has moved.
PMO for the data centre management team, and project manager on individual initiatives inside it. The position gave visibility across the whole portfolio without carrying programme accountability: reporting, coordination and the initiatives I ran personally.
Health monitoring of the European estate covering 3 primary, 7 secondary and 14 further sites. Rack defragmentation, consolidating load to fill racks and empty others for space and cooling efficiency. Server and full-building decommissioning, internal audits benchmarked against ANSI/TIA-942, obsolescence management of servers and components tracked in the configuration management database, improvement plans and multi-source status reporting.
Group infrastructure and operations teams, local markets, facility and audit functions, infrastructure vendors, programme management.
ANSI/TIA-942 and Uptime Institute benchmarks for audit, Remedy CMDB, capacity, power and cooling reporting, project and portfolio reporting, vendor coordination.
A Milan estate consolidated onto two buildings through a full-building decommissioning, worth 2M+ EUR per year in avoided cost. Twenty-four European sites brought under continuous health monitoring, with defragmentation freeing rack space and cooling capacity ahead of new demand. Component and server obsolescence run as a standing lifecycle process against the CMDB rather than as a series of emergencies. Left the engagement with three junior consultants reporting to me.