Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

It’s with great pleasure I announce that the hosting room of the Sheffield Data Centre is complete.

The first 4 racks are fully installed and (nearly) cabled.  We’ve this week placed an order for an additional 12 racks to meet customer demand, and we’ve started to show the first prospective clients round the building.

The “snag list” is nearly complete too, with only a few jobs remaining – most notibly the gassing of the air-conditioners which is scheduled to happen this Thursday. 

Today was also the day our 100Mbit fibre went live, with a connection straight through to the Internet.  We’ve now got a few days of testing and firewall building ahead, which is where the “fun” starts  :-)

So the question everybody’s been asking us… “when are you going to open??”.  Providing the air-con gassing goes ok, and the network build is complete and tested over the weekend, we’ll begin to offer colocation from next week.  So if you’re interested in colocation with us, now’s the time to email us and arrange a visit.

We’re booking people in to see us from next Monday (22nd), so either give us a call on 0114 228 0022 or email sales@sheffielddatacentre.com.  If you’ve already got your details registered with us you’ll be getting a more personalised invitation later this week, or you could queue jump and contact us!

And finally the usual update pics…

Computer room build complete

100Mbit fibre live

We’ve had lots of enquiries for racks with power over 16A, some up to a full 32A.

As advertised we’re including an APC UPS into the base of each rack, providing power up to 16A.  We’ll include 12A in the monthly price of the rack and any extra power you need is charged extra.

This is fine for regular servers and devices where the total rack power is less than 16A, but with newer technologies such as blade servers and SAN storage more power is required.

We’ve futureproofed the design of the Sheffield Data Centre by including 32A Commando sockets under each rack, and adjacent racks are on different phases of electricity.   For an extra fee we’ll be providing options to have a full 32A supply into a rack, with dual-UPS’s, dual-PDU’s and dual-phase supplies.  Obviously the cost will be higher and more room will be taken up in the cabinet with UPS’s.  But for clients who want blades, disk arrays, storage robots etc… this will be an ideal option.

Why seperate UPS’s?

We’ve been asked “why seperate UPS’s per rack?” – the answer is simple – Scalability.

In order to scale the Sheffield Data Centre from 1 rack up to 25 racks easily without upgrading (and possibly causing an outage) on a central power supply, or even worse putting service at risk by having a central UPS which can’t supply enough power, each rack will have a local UPS with it’s own mains feed.

There is a cost advantage too, because each UPS is the same, battery packs will all be standard and we can keep costs down.  Helping to give you (the customer) a more stable, secure, cost-effective service!

This week we hit a major milestone taget – getting the internal “heavy” construction complete, and taking delivery of the first 4 racks to go in the Sheffield Data Centre.

All the major work within the computer room is now complete, and we can turn our attention to cleaning and removing waste from the computer room.  Elsewhere the carpet tiles have been delivered and are being installed, the air-conditioners are due to be gassed next week and the first phase of Cat6 wiring has begun.  We should also be able to use our office as an office from next week!

The first four racks are due to be positioned Monday, these racks are for the internal comms, CCTV, fibre, infrastructure servers etc… and for the first phase of customer colocation.  Extra racks are on order and will be delivered when appropriate.

We’ll be making an “opening” announcement very soon - but we’re committed to having the first phase of colocation live before the end of June.  Check the blog next week for updates.

Latest pictures…

Computer room construction complete

Rack van

...here they come

First 4 racks ready to be installed next week

After the Sheffield Data Centre opens on the 10th June, we’re offering all colocation customers free bandwidth until 2010.

Single server customers (rack server or tower server) will enjoy 1Mbit free bandwidth, and full rack customers will enjoy 5Mbit free bandwidth.

Full rack colocation details here:
http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/colocation-racks.aspx

Single rack server colocation details here:
http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/colocation-servers.aspx

Single tower server colocation details here:
http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/colocation-towers.aspx

You get 1 IP address included with single servers, and up to 32 IP addresses with full racks.  If you need more IP addresses this is possible but may require justification to RIPE, if you can justify it you can have as many as you want!!

High Availability Hosting Limited are proud to announce the construction of a 25 rack hosting facility in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.  The Sheffield Data Centre will go live on Wednesday 10th June 2009 for customers wishing to colocate a server, a full rack, or outsource an existing IT suite to us.

Located in Holbrook, South East Sheffield (S20), we’re ideally located for easy access from the M1, A57 and Sheffield City Centre.  The Data Centre will have 1050U of usable rack space, and be able to host a mixture 900 physical and virtual servers at full capacity.

Keep an eye on the blog for updates as we begin the two month fitting out period, we’ll update the blog regurally with new information and pictures as we progress.  Your questions and comments are always welcome, simply get in touch!!

Stuart Stones, Rory Delahoyde – Company Directors
High Availability Hosting Limited / The Sheffield Data Centre
www.hahosting.com
www.thevirtualcloud.com
www.sheffielddatacentre.com
enquiries@sheffielddatacentre.com