Data centers
with the details that matter.
White space, electrical rooms, cooling plant, and campus expansion. We pair the capture method to the way your team will use the result.
What needs to be
measured first?
Nothing about a data centre tolerates disruption, so capture happens around live load in escorted windows. Densification, cooling upgrades, and campus expansion all depend on knowing real clearances above the racks and inside the electrical rooms rather than trusting a design set.
Every facility has a different risk surface. We start with access, geometry density, and the decision the capture needs to unlock — then choose between laser scanning, drone mapping, or both.
Talk through a scope- White space
- Electrical rooms
- Cooling plant
- Containment
- Generator yards
- Campus expansion
Capturing white space without touching live load
A data center is captured in the order that risk decreases: the rooms where nothing can be disturbed first, while everyone is fresh and escorts are available, then the plant, then the yard. Nothing about the sequence is negotiable once a crew is inside.
White space and containment
Cabinet rows, hot and cold aisle containment, the clear height above the cabinets, overhead busway and tray, and the position of everything hanging from structure. Containment panels block sightlines in both directions, so aisles need setups inside them rather than views along them.
Underfloor and overhead distribution
On a raised floor, the plenum below — cable trays, chilled water pipe, grid supports, and available depth — captured wherever tiles can be lifted. On a slab-based hall, the same information lives overhead, and the ceiling zone becomes the congested volume instead.
Electrical rooms
Switchgear lineups, UPS modules, battery rooms, PDUs, and the working clearances in front of them. Electrical rooms are where densification projects usually run out of room first, and they are also where the fewest people have ever taken a measurement.
Mechanical plant
CRAC and CRAH units, chilled water headers and pumps, valve arrangements, and the routes pipe takes between plant and hall. Cooling upgrades are pipe routing problems, and pipe routing needs the geometry of what is already in the way.
Generator yard, fuel, and roof
Generator enclosures, radiators, fuel storage and fill points, switchgear yards, and roof-mounted condensers and dry coolers. Aerial capture handles roof and yard in one pass and ties them to the same control as the interior.
Escorts, uptime, and the no-photography rule
Access is the entire project management problem. Badging, background requirements, escort ratios, anti-tailgating procedures, and equipment inspection at the door all take longer to arrange than the capture takes to perform. Inside the hall the rules are simple and absolute: nothing is touched, nothing is unplugged, no tile is lifted without permission, and no setup blocks an aisle a technician might need. Change-freeze periods are worth checking before proposing a date, because some sites will not permit any non-essential work during them.
Photography restrictions are common enough to plan around rather than hope about. Where imagery of the hall is not permitted, the capture is configured for the site's rules and the resulting deliverable limitations are stated in advance. Aerial work over a data center campus is usually a separate approval again, involving both the airspace authorization and the operator's own security process, and that approval takes the longest lead time of anything in the scope.
More on how this works in practice is on our guide to scanning without a shutdown.
Deliverables for densification and expansion
Data center projects are almost always about whether something new fits into a room that is already full, so the deliverable needs to support interference checking rather than description.
| The decision | What to ask for | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Cabinet densification or a new row | Point cloud plus a dimensioned hall plan | Aisle widths, clear height above cabinets, and busway positions are what the row layout has to satisfy. |
| Cooling or electrical upgrade | Revit or IFC model of the affected plant and routes | New pipe, duct, and conduit have to clash against what is installed, which needs modeled systems rather than points. |
| Equipment delivery and replacement | Point cloud plus a route and clearance study | A chiller or switchgear section has to travel from the yard to its position through every door on the way. |
| Colocation and audit records | Registered cloud plus as-built plans | A documented record of the room as it stands supports handover, audits, and every future change request. |
Formats and what each one is good for are covered on the deliverables page.
What gets missed in a live hall
- Skipping the underfloor plenum — On a raised floor, half the constraint is below your feet. If no tiles are lifted, the survey documents a room whose most congested volume was never seen, and every subsequent routing decision is made against an assumption.
- Measuring clear height at the wall — The number that matters is the height above the cabinets, under the lowest tray, busway, or sprinkler branch in that row — not the slab-to-deck dimension at the perimeter. Reporting it as a single figure hides exactly the variation a taller cabinet cares about.
- Containment treated as transparent — Containment panels, doors, and blanking are opaque to the instrument and split the hall into narrow corridors. Capture inside them takes more setups than the floor area suggests, and a scope priced on square footage alone will be short.
- Forgetting the path in — Halls get planned in detail while the corridor, lift, ramp, and door the equipment must travel through get ignored. The route deserves the same dimensional care as the destination, because it is where projects actually fail.
What data center operators ask
Is any of this a risk to live equipment?
A tripod-mounted scanner is passive: it takes no power from the room, connects to nothing, emits no significant heat, and produces no vibration of consequence. The genuine risks are human and physical — someone brushing a cable, blocking an aisle, or moving a tile — which is why the working rules are that nothing is touched and every setup position is agreed in advance.
Can you work inside a change freeze?
That is your policy to apply, and some operators treat any non-essential activity in the hall as a change. It is worth confirming before a date is set, because the alternative — capturing the plant, electrical rooms, and yard first and returning for the hall later — is a perfectly workable plan if it is decided in advance rather than on the day.
How do you handle photography restrictions?
By configuring the capture to the site's rules and being explicit about what the deliverable will and will not contain. Geometry can be captured without usable imagery of the hall, though it costs some of the visual context that makes a point cloud easy to navigate, so the trade-off is worth discussing rather than discovering later.
Can you cover the whole campus in one project?
Yes, and one control network across the campus is the main argument for doing it that way. Halls, electrical rooms, plant, generator yards, roofs, and the land earmarked for the next building all end up in the same coordinate system, which is what makes the dataset useful for expansion planning rather than only for the room that was scanned.
Pair TLS interiors with drone exteriors for one coordinate story.
Roof, yard, tanks, structures, and the building envelope can live in the same project handoff when the control is planned upfront.
See existing conditionsMake the invisible
measurable.
Tell us what is inside, outside, and on the line. We will help you scope the capture and the handoff — in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.
Request a scan quote