The brief
An auto-components manufacturer near Chakan was running its ERP, design files and CCTV recorder from a converted store cupboard on the shop floor. There was no dedicated cooling, one shared power circuit, and no structured cabling — every new machine added another cable draped over a rack rail. The plant had already lost half a shift to a heat-related shutdown.
They asked IT Traders for a server room that could carry the next five years of growth, and for one partner to own the whole build rather than coordinating four vendors themselves.
What we found on survey
Our L3 engineers spent two days on site before quoting anything. The findings shaped the design more than the wish-list did:
- Ambient temperature in the cupboard peaked well above the safe operating range for the ERP host.
- No UPS runtime beyond a few minutes, and no generator changeover testing.
- Flat network — the CCTV, shop-floor machines and office PCs all shared one broadcast domain.
- Backups were being written to an external drive that lived in the same room as the server.
That last point mattered most. A fire or a flood in that cupboard would have taken the production data and its only copy at the same time.
What we built
The build was delivered as a single turnkey project under our End to End IT Infra Setup service, so the civil work, electricals, cabling and commissioning ran to one plan and one timeline.
- Compute and storage. A pair of rack servers with shared storage sized for the ERP and the design library, specified and supplied through our Servers & Storage Solutions practice.
- Structured cabling and switching. A properly dressed rack with patch panels and labelled runs, designed under Networking & Design and built on switching from our Networking Architecture range. Shop-floor, office and camera traffic now sit on separate VLANs.
- Shop-floor coverage. Access points surveyed and heat-mapped for a metal-heavy environment as part of our Managed WiFi Solution.
- Surveillance. The recorder moved out of the production VLAN and onto its own segment, with cameras supplied under CCTV & IP Surveillance.
- Backup and recovery. An on-site copy plus an off-site replica, with restore drills scheduled — our Disaster Recovery & Backup service.
Results
The plant now has a room it can audit: known temperature, known power runtime, a labelled rack and a restore that has actually been tested rather than assumed. Adding a machine is a patch-panel job instead of another cable over the rail.
Ongoing support runs on a scheduled AMC Contract, so preventive visits and SLA-backed response are booked in rather than arranged in a crisis.
Why manufacturers ask for this
Production IT fails differently from office IT — a stopped line has a rupee-per-minute cost attached. That is why our manufacturing practice starts with the physical environment and the recovery plan, not the server spec.
Planning something similar? Our server room planning checklist walks through the same survey we run before quoting.
