Resilient, Agile Digital Infrastructure Keeps Mercury Building

Today’s engineering and construction designs are highly dependent on sharing information from digital technologies such as 3D modeling, smart devices and augmented reality (AR), as well as physical information systems. To keep within tight deadlines and budgets, fast and reliable access to a hybrid IT environment that supports both virtual and physical infrastructure is essential for engineering firms to excel in this dynamic sector.

Mercury Engineering is an international engineering and construction contractor based in Dublin, Ireland that is reimagining how people work and live in their built environments. It is responsible for engineering designs and construction across a range of key industry sectors throughout Europe, including data centers, manufacturing plants and hospitals. By deploying a redundant data center, network and digital infrastructure on Platform Equinix®, Mercury gained a more resilient environment for business continuity and disaster recovery—keeping its data safe, and its workers online and productive.

Continued access to construction data secures project success

Mercury partnered with Equinix to move its hybrid IT services from its own data centers onto a more reliable, interconnected global data center and digital infrastructure platform. The company works with 3D modeling, smart devices and AR tools at each construction site by connecting frontline construction workers at the edge. For example, RealWear® smart headsets enable workers to survey a site and converse with design engineers remotely in an AR environment, allowing direct and secure access to cloud services.

Mercury Engineering worker wearing a mixed reality HoloLens headset to see a Building Information Model (BIM) projected into the real environment as part of a factory acceptance test in an offsite manufacturing location.

According to Adam Hoffman, IT Infrastructure Manager, Mercury Engineering, “Today’s construction business cannot operate without continued access to the latest construction data. If up-to-date design information is not accessible, everything stops.”

Giving engineers reliable real-time access to this data was critical to Mercury’s business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) and data protection objectives. The company moved its IT infrastructure from its own data centers to the more reliable, secure Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) facilities in Dublin and created an active-active BC/DR environment on Platform Equinix. This gave Mercury the high-performance interconnectivity and resiliency it needed to scale up its business and connect more project locations into its central infrastructure, while providing greater protection for its valuable project data.

Using Equinix Fabric™ software-defined interconnection, Mercury built a high-performance, secure and resilient interconnected “hub and spoke” configuration for all of its global construction sites. Equinix Fabric enabled the company to directly and securely access Microsoft Azure services via Azure ExpressRoute, in addition to directly accessing other SaaS applications. This allowed Mercury users to run the digital construction workloads directly in the cloud, quickly and securely.

Mercury leverages Microsoft peering to support its increasingly hybrid infrastructure and back up large volumes of data to Azure via dedicated, high-speed, low-latency connections. It is also planning to move its entire on-premises SAP landscape to Azure for greater scalability via Equinix Fabric and Azure ExpressRoute, making it ready for its migration to SAP S/4HANA.

On Platform Equinix, Mercury also gained access to critical digital and business partner ecosystems via Equinix Fabric to co-innovate and scale its engineering and construction capabilities for greater competitive advantage.

High-performance, low-latency connectivity at the edge speeds backup times

Mercury required dedicated high-performance, low-latency connectivity at the edge to safely and securely process and back up the tremendous amounts of data created at its construction sites (approximately 100 terabytes) to Microsoft Azure. On Platform Equinix, the company realized faster offsite data backups with a lower recovery point objective (RPO) to Azure—performing more timely backups without impacting other applications’ performance.

Accelerated project site addition and global expansion

Moving its entire IT infrastructure to Equinix allowed Mercury to gain the high-performance connectivity and resiliency it needed to quickly scale up project sites and add more locations globally. Equinix Fabric with Azure ExpressRoute also provided the company a more agile, stable and scalable peering service, making future European PoP expansions possible.

Building for a more sustainable future

Mercury Engineering and Equinix are also partners in building sustainable data centers for the future. The companies have worked together on multiple Equinix IBX facility projects including those in Frankfurt, Zurich and London.

Mercury’s sustainability strategy, “Our Planet, Our Duty”, outlines its objectives as a responsible business and shows its commitment to an environmental, social and governance (ESG) journey with sustainability goals aligning with UN Sustainable Development Goals. At Equinix, our Future First strategy includes setting a sustainability goal to be climate neutral by 2030, backed by science-based targets, across our global portfolio and data center platform. As our 2021 Equinix Sustainability Report shows, we did a lot to achieve our Future First goals last year.

To learn more about how Mercury Engineering is building and scaling its engineering and construction business on Platform Equinix, read the Mercury Engineering case study.