Case Study: Grimshaw Architects

Grimshaw Architects

Grimshaw Architects is an architectural firm based in London. In particular, they are known for their design of transport projects including The London Elizabeth Line, the Amsterdam Bijlmer ArenA railway station, Waterloo International railway station, the award-winning Southern Cross railway station and the Eden Project in Cornwall.  As an international practice Grimshaw covers architecture, planning and industrial design across all major sectors.

The Business Challenge

Before the pandemic, yet spurred on by the pandemic, Danny Gillmore, Director of Information Technology, at Grimshaw embarked on a project to provide several hundred Grimshaw architects with powerful workstations hosted in the cloud. These workstations would take the form of the new HP Zmini workstation hosted by Datanet in our ARK data centre. Come forward some three years and Danny’s vision has become a reality.

Datanet’s Solution

Grimshaw takes 6 racks from Datanet and deploys some 200 HP Zmini across the racks together with switches and firewalls. Seamus Conway, IT Manager, provided Datanet with the network layout diagram. Seamus has opted for a structured cabling solution with Aruba switches and a pair of HA Firewalls, all based on dual resilient 10Gb connectivity out to the Internet.

“For resilience, connectivity and security we chose the Datanet Ark data centre because we have worked with Datanet before and we have always found them very helpful and accommodating. Their ethos aligns with Grimshaw and we love their new data centre, the big racks and abundant choice of bandwidth providers lends itself to the HP Zmini deployment.”

Danny Gillmore, Director of Information Technology, Grimshaw Architects