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About the Data Centre: Network

High capacity and reliable networks are one of the most important and essential parts of any data centre. The Sheffield Data Centre has capacity for both fibre and copper services, and peers with Tier-1 providers.

Internet Connectivity

Our Tier-1 providers are ntl:Telewest and BT.

Located just 1.2 miles away from the BT POP, our Fibre services are located in dedicated conduits within BT’s ducts. We have “Managed Internet” contracts with our providers, backed by Service Level Agreements.

Capacity for multiple fibre services allow us to give almost limitless internet capacity for our customers needs. We also have a number of copper services into the data centre for monitoring, telephony and alerting.

Redundant Cisco switches and active / passive edge routers and gateways with auto failover ensure continuous connectivity.

We are full members of RIPE, and have our own AS Numbers, routable blocks, and registered DNS servers.

Core Networking

Our core network is duplicated at every step, multiple Cisco edge routers, multiple Cisco core switches and a stack of Netgear colocation switches.

All core networking is locked at Gigabit speeds, with tails to racks also at Gigabit speeds if the server supports it. Core switches are connected to Cisco routers running BGP4 to our service providers.

Our new Low Latency Network for gaming servers is directly connected to our Core Switches providing the lowest latency possible for the ultimate gaming experience. See the Gaming Colocation page for more information.

Rack Connectivity

Each customer rack has a patch panel with Category 6 cabling terminating into our comms racks. Customer servers are connected to our switches over Gigabit Ethernet (1000Mbit), with redundant switches covering odd and even patch panel ports. Single servers get 2 switch ports, quarter racks get 4 swith ports, half racks get 10 switch ports, and full racks get 20 switch ports.