Data Centres

Why is pest control so important to Data Centres?

Housing servers, air conditioning units and critical networking equipment, data centres are designed with physical security and cooling efficiency in mind, however, they also offer rodents the perfect habitat to shelter indoors and easily migrate using cooling ducts and along cable runs. The cost to fix gnawed structured cabling and fibre lines fixing pest damage could be a costly and easily avoided exercise. Rodent damage has the potential to cost thousands but also affect critical online services that businesses rely on, negatively impacting your uptime SLA!

With data centres becoming increasingly common across the UK & Ireland and in both urban and rural locations, they attract a range of pests as well as offering a unique challenge for any pest control company.

Pest Pulse was brought in as a leader in the remote monitoring space and was asked to survey the pest control at one of Irelands largest data centres.

What we found?

The sheer size of the site and coverage required a high bait box deployment. 350+ monitoring points were deployed across the site, the monthly routine pest control visit taking between 1 - 2 working days to complete, with the requirements to be escorted by on-site security staff, regular pest control had become an increasingly labour intensive exercise for both the pest control company and the managing agents.

1 visit per month was totalling 4 man-days combined.

In Ireland a change to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine(DAFM) “Permanent baiting” rules. Leaving toxic rodenticide in a bait box is no longer permitted (Similar restrictions can also be found in the UK).

This practice employed by many traditional pest control companies was leaving the site without a permanent way to control rodents.

What we deliver

By taking a consultative approach to understand the requirements and risk profile of the site, we were able to deliver a proactive pest control solution that gave the data centre owners confidence in a remotely monitored pest control solution.

This included detailed discussions, site surveys and on-going audits to establish Pest Pulse’s risk-based approach to pest control and position smart traps across the estate, providing 24/7 monitoring and real-time alerts. 

What was the impact?

By switching just 33% of the sites bait boxes over to smart we were able to gain a unique insight into the scale of and the location of rodents where there was previously little or no insight in how infestations were evolving. This insight allows us to run the site at 100% non-toxic.

Over the initial 90 day period of the Pest Pulse installation, there were 24 activity alerts from our remote sensors, with 16 confirmed rodent catches.

This was a 100% increase where the previous Pest control provider solely relied on staff sightings and reports by contractors working on site.

Pest Pulse and the customer can both view real-time analytics via cloud-based software and will receive notifications as soon as a trap is activated, so technicians can investigate and execute corrective actions before an infestation happens, this smart approach led to an 80% reduction in monthly routine service time.