Clean enough for a Data Center?
Our team is specialised in data center cleaning and controlled environments, during construction and in live operation.
What we see on other sites
If you walk through a site on a Friday afternoon, you can usually tell how it is run. There is cardboard in the plant room, drilling dust in the cable trays, and the walkway is on the plan but not on the floor. Cleaning was planned as one line at the end of the schedule.
In an office building this costs a few days before handover. In a data center the dust from the raised floor has reached the air handling units by the time the systems are tested.
What a data center or cleanroom requires
Operators and IT manufacturers expect the white space to meet ISO 14644 Class 8 or better, both before the equipment is installed and during operation. ASHRAE TC 9.9 describes how this is done in practice, with HEPA filtered vacuums, antistatic cleaning agents and ESD protection for the people doing the work.
Laboratories and pharma cleanrooms have stricter rules. ISO 14644 defines the class and how it is verified, and where GMP applies, Annex 1 adds its own requirements for cleaning and documentation. Both need a record of who cleaned what, with which agent and when, plus the particle count before and after.
Construction cleaning and final clean
We put construction cleaning into the schedule from the first week. In a data center or cleanroom the white space is cleaned before the equipment arrives. There is a written procedure for this and the work is signed off. The cleaning record goes to the client with the handover documents.
Data center cleaning in a live environment
Cleaning does not stop once the data center is live. Server racks, raised floors and cold aisles are cleaned while the systems are running, without switching anything off. The people doing this wear ESD footwear, work with grounded tools, HEPA vacuums and approved cleaning agents, and are trained for it. Our team includes certified Data Centre Cleaning Specialists and is ESD trained. We measure the particle count before and after, and the operator gets a report for audits and insurance.
Why we are expanding this
Data center capacity in Switzerland has more than doubled since 2020, and the projects in the pipeline will double it again.
«We set up the cleaning team because we needed it on the sites we build. Now operators ask us to come in on projects we are not building. Data centers are going up across Switzerland and Europe and all of them need this before, during and after handover.»
Cosimo Russo, Founder and Partner of CORUS
We are looking for people with experience in cleanroom or data center cleaning to join this team. Open positions are at corus.ag/karriere
