On the sixth day of CloudMas Dataquest Group offered me…

December 10, 2020

Six datacentres

After the excitement of yesterday and the offer of five chocolate biscuits, we are back in more familiar territory with a look at more details of our Cloud service and what sets DataQuest apart, other than our heritage, expertise, client-centric approach, flexibility, agility, efficiency….you get the idea.

Central to our offering, is the datacentres in which we house your data, your applications, quite possibly your entire business. This makes the considerations we give to the stature of each datacentre amongst the six we use currently, incredibly important.

As the value of your data, or more accurately perhaps the value associated with a disruption to your ability to access it has increased, the importance of securing it has grown in direct proportion. Which is why we specify the best ultra-secure Tier 3 data centres for our Cloud services.

Best-of-breed data centres for your data

Given the importance of the need for security, resilience and availability when assessing data centres, one of those we selected was Telehouse West in London and when we look in detail at its specification it’s easy to see why.

Telehouse West was opened 2010 and is one of four data centres at the company’s Docklands campus in East London, home to Europe’s most carrier-dense data centre environment, including internet exchanges and Cloud service providers like us.

The data centre is carrier neutral with points of presence from different providers, ensuring low latency and diverse connectivity, whilst holding the highest security certifications and boasting biometrics, full CCTV surveillance, 360° monitored perimeter and dedicated on-site security.

It is also classed as a building of ‘national importance’ in the event of civil unrest etc., which means if it all gets a bit heated in and around Docklands, the building will be defended by the police.

When it’s calm as normal, we can get in whenever we want and our experienced team can access our hardware 24/7, 365 days a year to manage, upgrade or resolve any issues as part of the Cloud-based services we provide, including our BaaS and DRaaS solutions.

The power to compute, connect and cool

The physical security is important, but a data centre needs power to run all the equipment, connectivity to the outside world and a lot of cooling – a problem with any one of these critical elements could be terminal.

The Docklands site includes private dual primary substations offering a total capacity of 50MVA with cooling, connected directly to the National Grid via two 132kV power lines to reduce transmission loss and ensure security of supply.

If that wasn’t enough, the site includes eight 2.5MVA 11kV generators with N+1 redundant standby generators providing a minimum of 24 hours autonomy at full capacity, if there is an interruption to supply from the grid – an unrivalled belt and braces approach.

Taking fire detection and suppression seriously completes the package, with a fully addressable two stage fire detection system that monitors all rooms within the data centre and the under-floor space too, enhanced by very early smoke detection alarms (VESDA) installed throughout the facility.

In the event a fire is detected, your data is kept safe by a dry sprinkler fire suppression system, which minimise disruption and ensure minor problems remain localised.

Replication to another datacentre

You are unlucky if you suffer a catastrophic loss of data to an accident, natural disaster or malicious intent, but you’d have to be incredibly unlucky if the data centre storing your backup or recovery solution was also affected by a terminal failure.

But it can happen, so our solutions replicate data from the Telehouse West data Centre to a separate centre operated by a different company in a different part of the world – well Slough, rather than London.

The LD4 data centre operated by Equinix offers the same security and resilience as the Telehouse facility in Docklands, but geographical separation and different service providers ensure we are protecting your data against the unimaginable odds of three points of failure at the same time.

This attention to detail is why organisations that value their data and their ability to access it, whatever happens in the future, are turning to us here at DataQuest to devise comprehensive backup and recovery solutions that offer real peace of mind in turbulent times.

And while we picked these two as examples of the level of quality provided by our chosen datacentres, any of the other four we use for colocation and replication would stand the same scrutiny – you were wondering how we got it to be six, weren’t you?

We’re only six days in and already you should understand why DataQuest should be central to your Cloud solutions. But to discover more reasons, please get in touch with Chris Baker, on 0333 800 8800 or email [email protected] and he’ll ‘lay’ out or advantages – see what we did there?