United Biscuits data centre certified to new EN50600 data centre standard
United Biscuits has become one of the first companies in Europe to achieve a data center accreditation to the new European data centre standard, EN50600.
As the leading manufacturer and marketer of biscuits in the UK and second largest in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Ireland, the company owns and operates 16 manufacturing facilities, of which seven are in the UK. At its Liverpool Group Business centre, United Biscuits maintains one of its corporate data centres.
In order to raise overall reliability and usability of the data centre United Biscuits appointed Capitoline to audit and assess their current design and installation against the EN 50600 data centre standard. From the original audit came an improvement plan and management training that led to the data centre being accredited to one of the Classes of Availability defined in the EN 50600 standard.
Barry Elliott of Capitoline said, “The new EN 50600 data centre standard is an excellent tool for any European-based data centre to measure itself against latest best practice and to develop long-term management plans for the resilience and maintainability of their data centre.”
Jamie Wilson, Group Head of IS for United Biscuits UK stated, “One of our corporate values is competitiveness which encourages everyone in United Biscuits to look externally and benchmark their activities against not only our competitors but also the general market place. I challenged our IS Operations team to benchmark our data centre facilities externally to an internationally recognised standard. Capitoline helped us through this whole process by auditing what we have, training our staff in data centre management techniques and developing an improvement plan to increase the reliability and resilience of our data centre.”
EN50600 is Europe’s new data centre facilities and infrastructure standard published by CENELEC. CENELEC is the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization and is responsible for standardization in the electrotechnical engineering field. EN50600 is published in each EU member state as the national standard for data centres. Under the EU Directive on Public Procurement organisations in Europe spending public money must use CEN, CENELEC or ETSI standards where they exist.
