The Data Centre
Completed in June 2009 after a 12 week build, the Sheffield Data Centre has
converted 93 square metres (1000 square feet) of flexible space into a Tier 2 hosting facility.
Located less than 8 miles outside Sheffield City Centre, and just over 5 miles from the M1 motorway, the
facility provides businesses of all sizes in Sheffield and South Yorkshire high quality, reasonably
priced and professionally managed Data Centre services, something we felt before as not currently available
within the city.
| Delivery paths: | 1 |
| Redundancy: | N+1 |
| Floor loading weight: | At least 488kg m^2 |
| Utility voltage: | 230VAC three phase |
| Availability: | 99.8% |
| Downtime before SLA: | 17 hours per annum |
| Hosting floor space: | 1050U of usable rack space over 76 sq metres |
| Floor: | Raised access floor protecting power and network cables |
| Layout: | "Airlock" from main entrance to data area |
| Building amenities: | Car parking, loading bay, toilets, fire escapes, plant room |
| Utility supply: | On-site YEDL substation direct to grid, 3-phase feed to building |
| Footprint: | Up to 32A per rack |
| Backup UPS: | Independent rack UPS protection for servers and core network |
| Backup generators: | On site 100kVA diesel generator |
| Fuel supply: | 12 hours continuous at 100% with fuel supply arrangements |
| Cooling: | 18,000m^3 Evaporative cooler with balanced ventilation / extraction
Conventional air conditioning backup |
| Air handling: | Hot / cold rack isles with sealed hot air extraction |
| Fire detection: | 24x7 off-site monitored smoke / fire detectors |
| Security: | 24x7 off-site monitored Honeywell alarm
Paxton Access control throughout building
Internal and External off-site monitored CCTV |
| Access: | 24 hour access available (for full/half rack customers) |
| Monitoring: | 24x7 internal and external monitoring of building + infrastructure with automatic out of hours callouts |
| Providers: | BT Copper (Sheffield Mosborough) and ntl:Telewest Fibre (Sheffield Chippingham) |
| Core networking: | Redundant Cisco switches, active / passive site edge routers with auto failover |
| Equipment networking: | Gigabit (1000Mbit) to the server, redundant switch ports available |
Location
As part of the initial planning phase, and consultations with Sheffield City Council, the Environment Agency and
prospective clients, it was decided to locate the Data Centre out of the city centre and Don Valley
areas - away from the areas affected by the flooding in 2007, but still within the city limits.
The Environment Agency report on the post code of the new Data Centre sites the area as
not at risk of
"Flooding from rivers or sea without defences", and
not at risk of "Extent of extreme flood".
The yellow square is where the Data Centre is located.
About the Sheffield Data Centre, specifications and major systems - cooling, network, power, security.