Datacentre Overview Unlike many hosting providers who lease servers from another company, all of our services are provided on equipment which is privatley owned and operated by us. This gives us an unpresedented amount of control over our equipment, and gives us much more flexability. Our primary datacentre facility in which we own multiple racks, is Spectrum House located just outside of London in Maidenhead, Berkshire UK. Spectrum House provides us with a secure and reliable location to house our equipment, with N+1 redundancy on Network, Cooling and Power, and VESA (Very Early Smoke detection Apperatus). Network
Connectivity in Spectrum House is provided by the latest and greatest Cisco VSS cluster configuration, which is essentially two Cisco routers in a single chassis in a redundant clustered configuration. We also carry 1 spare individual router for backup/redundancy purposes. The building features diverse fibre inputs with fibre entering the building from either side, eliminating a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) in the event of damage to the cable, often referred to as a fibre break. The network uses the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP4) to determine the fastest possible route, with multiple carriers from leading ISP's.
Each of our racks has it's own dedicated 48 Port HP Procurve switch, distributing connectivity to the internet from the routers to individual servers. The switch in each rack has a single gigabit (1000mbit) or dual gigabit drop from the VSS cluster. Each individual server has a dedicated 100mbit (full duplex) connection to the switch, and onto the internet. Power Spectrum House has it's own substation onsite, with a direct feed from electricity supplier. Redundant power is provided by battery-based UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) systems, which provide approximatley 5 minutes of power, in which time the multiple onsite Diesel generators will kick in and take over the load. The onsite generators are tested on a regular basis, and Spectrum House maintains contracts with local energy suppliers for refueling as needed. Cooling Cooling in Spectrum House is provided by N+1 Airdale air conditioning systems. The data floor is organised into cold and hot isles. All cold isles feature air conditioning vents in the raised-flooring, providing adequete cooling for servers. Security The facility is manned 24x7x365 by at least 2 personnel, and the facility features secure, high-perimeter fencing, with CCTV of all areas of the building 24x7x365. Only datacentre personnel are allowed on the data floor, and all other visitors/datacentre customers are escorted onto the datafloor with datacentre personnel between the hours of 8AM-8PM. We have full and unlimited access to datacentre staff (remote hands) 24x7x365. VESA VESA, otherwise known as "Very Early Smoke detection Apperatus" monitors the quality of air within the facility, and should for example a Power Supply fail in a server, it will alert the NOC (Network Operations Centre), tell them which Zone the issue is in, and it will be checked out. Other datacentre facilities may use Fire Suppression systems instead of VESA, which basically means when the system detectes fire it will act on it i.e. by releasing a special gas into the data floor, which can result in unnecesarry downtime. Hardware Overview All of our hardware within the datacentre is enterprise-class, in otherwords it was built and designed to be used in a datacentre environment 24x7x365. Our primary hardware supplier is Supermicro although we also use systems from Dell. Some hosting providers, particualy low cost/budget providers tend to build their own systems from desktop parts. If good quality parts are used they can be quite reliable, however they are not designed to be on 24x7 and as such will likely suffer more issues in the long-run. We maintain a small collection of spare components onsite, such as Motherboards, RAM, Hard Disks and power supplies, for minimum downtime in the event of hardware failure. In addition we have support contracts with our hardware vendors, spare components stored off-site with some of our staff, and in worst-case scenario we can more than likely find another suitable chassis to drop the existing hard disks into. One of the other key benefits of using enterprise-class hardware, is that we can provide options such as IPMI or DRAC. IPMI or DRAC are technologies which allow us to remotley reboot, power on, reload the operating system or access KVM-Over-IP on a server at any time. On many of our dedicated servers, we also provide this option to customers, for maximum control over their machine. Summary To summarise, Spectrum House provides us with an excellent level of redundancy, security and control over our equipment. All customers benefit from our enterprise-class hardware, and one of the best networks in the UK. Speed Tests Want to see how our network compares with your current hosting provider? Pingable IP: 95.154.207.2 Our Uptime Stats can be seen here |
