We’re very excited for you to meet our Engineering Manager, Josh Carvalho.
Josh joined us back in late 2023, from the demanding world of electrical engineering, having spent the formative years of his career garnering extensive experience across all facets of electrical system design and implementation.
With a passion for powering the future and an impressive background in the design and installation of critical power systems, Josh brings with him a wealth of experience and knowledge to our ever-growing team. His arrival marked another pivotal moment in our journey, as we continue to strengthen our position as a world-leading data centre operator.
As our Engineering Manager, Josh plays a crucial role in shaping the future of Netwise and its deployed assets. His leadership, technical acumen, and commitment to excellence has undoubtedly resulted in another ‘level up’ to our in-house capabilities, as we continue to expand our suite of services.
Josh’s arrival has tangibly demonstrated our unwavering commitment to providing only the very highest quality of service to our clients, with limited reliance on any third parties.
You can expect to see Josh in a design and implementation role across our core infrastructure, as well as in the field, getting hands on with the systems responsible for keeping your business online 24×7.
This month we’re very happy to officially announce the next major phase of development and expansion at our Netwise London East (NLE) data centre.
We’re facilitating this expansion by pushing into the adjacent building on the Datapoint estate, which sits alongside our existing four-hall facility. This will result in a single expanded facility housing six high-specification data halls.
The initial fit-out phase began in July, with the main internal schedule of technical works set to begin in early 2025. This project will expand NLE by 168 racks, increasing the total internal area of the building by around 13,000ft2.
The new building is being fully refurbished – both inside and out – following the departure of the previous occupants, ahead of the main work schedule which will start thereafter.
This is our first major step towards developing NLE into a campus-style facility, which spans multiple buildings on the same estate. The two units will become a single operational building, with multiple pass-through points for clients and staff, as well as for the sharing of core services.
Alongside the additional rack capacity, this new space will also introduce further amenities and technical features, including increased capacity for staff, a second loading bay and storage area, more on-site parking and EV charging, as well as improvements to our water handling capabilities.
There will also be flexible space held for future use, which will provide additional service options for potential wholesale customers, for things such as private on-site NOC capabilities.
"This represents another seven-figure investment by Netwise in its own future, and the future of its clients. To be announcing this level of growth at NLE only a couple of years after the first clients moved in is something we're very proud of; it's a testament to the strength of this sector, and our own position within it."Matt Seaton, Director
The uptake of services at NLE has been extremely impressive since it soft-opened in the spring of 2022, with the phased fit-out schedule just keeping pace with demand. The current building now has three of the four data halls deployed. The final hall in this building is scheduled to be online by the end of 2024.
The two new halls coming as part of the facility expansion project will be larger than the halls in the current building, housing 84 racks per hall at maximum rack density – a 33% increase per hall. These new halls will house three containment pods each, giving greater scope for private space options.
In June, the Netwise London Central (NLC) facility officially closed, having served clients for 10 years. The forthcoming expansion at Netwise London East would become one of the main driving factors behind the decision to shutter NLC, as many core components within the site reached end of life.
The large seven-figure reinvestment required to adequately refresh NLC has instead been diverted to the new facility, which has the forward-looking scope to springboard Netwise into the next phase in its growth cycle.
The NLE expansion comes as Netwise continues to welcome an exciting range of new clients into its facilities, as well as facilitating the growth of its long-standing customers.
"We always knew that we'd be expanding NLE in time, to facilitate our growth trajectory, however to be at that stage already is a tangible demonstration of our performance and reputation in this industry. I'm very excited by this next phase, particularly as we come out the back of the NLC closure, which required considerable care and attention."Matthew Butt, Managing Director
The expansion of NLE will bolster our position as a leading data centre operator in the high-demand East London / Docklands region, as we further the already significant investments made in our flagship facility, which has been in operation since mid-2022.
While finer details of the technical plans are still expected to develop over the closing months of 2024, the overarching plans are already locked in, and can be discussed with interested parties that may be looking to utilise bulk space in the new side of the facility.
The Netwise team cannot wait to show you around the new side of the facility as it develops. And as always, the #buildblog will be back in action, documenting the entire build process, so be sure to keep an eye out for new posts.
It’s been a while since we last published a Phase 2 update from Netwise London East (NLE), so we thought it would be a good time to update everyone on the current state of play.
We’ve been remarkably busy with both the ongoing expansion works at NLE, alongside the closure of Netwise London Central (NLC), which was retired from active service in early June.
Data Hall 4 went live in May, and quite remarkably, it’s already a touch over half full, despite opening to new clients just a couple of months ago. This is in large part thanks to the absorption of our customer base from NLC, which we migrated over the course of eight evenings in May, however we have also welcomed a host of exciting new clients into our latest data hall.
Let’s take a look at what’s been happening. We start with updates from back in mid-April, before jumping ahead to current day:
It’s fair to say that this summer has already been one of our busiest periods on record. Deploying a new data hall at NLE is no small task in itself, but to deliver this alongside the decommissioning of NLC – which also involved the in-house planning and execution of an entire facility migration – leaves us feeling incredibly proud of the team we have driving Netwise. The complexity of successfully realising a multi-faceted project like this cannot be understated, and seeing these tasks result in tangible improvements to service for our clients is always incredibly pleasing, particularly after making seven figure investments in our future here at London East.
But as with any operation of this nature, these are just the headline deliverable outcomes that have been worked on over the past several months. We’ve undertaken plenty of additional projects in tandem over the last quarter, which may be of interest to our readers.
We completed our full core network upgrade in May, with the final upgrade – and the most major works list – happening at our HEX/LD8 node. This involved a full conversion of this location to our Supernode architecture, which in this case required a full cabinet swap to accommodate. This type of thing requires considerable planning, however our team were able to complete the entire works list within the four hour maintenance window, which was an impressive feat. We also undertook a minor upgrade to our core node in Redcentric Shoreditch (formerly CLL), which brought the entire network upgrade project to completion. This comes as demand on our network grows rapidly, delivering world-class connectivity to clients across all of our on-net locations.
We also grew our fleet in spring, with the addition of an electric pick-up truck, and our own low-loader, which is perfect for rack migrations. The latter vehicle comes in a relatively rare specification for us, with extra height and a 750kg tail lift, which makes it absolutely ideal for the movement of fully populated racks – a game changer for most facility migration projects.
As part of bringing Data Hall 4 online in May, we rolled out new cooling system architecture, which involved some adjustments to how the extraction side of the system works. We now have a twin-hall shared extraction plenum, with a centralised control system, which we believe to be the first of its kind for an evaporative system such as ours. This involved the expert design work of multiple teams, and will also be a part of the roll-out for Data Hall 3 later this year.
Further to this, we have additional cooling being deployed in all data halls in the next few weeks, through the modular installation of further evaporative coolers. Each room is growing from four CREC units, to six CREC units.
NLC closure and migration project
In May, we migrated all of the clients in our London Central facility to our new London East facility.
This took many months of planning, however we were able to complete the physical migration process in just eight evening sessions – a real testament to our broad in-house capabilities.
All 126 enclosures were successfully transitioned to our London East facility (with a few landing in other on-net locations where required), with most racks moved in a fully-populated state. This allowed for minimal client disruption, and the fastest possible transition from one site to the other. The fastest migration window took just two hours, from power down at NLC, to being back online at NLE.
Here we have some photos of the now retired facility, which served our clients well for nearly a decade:
The end of an era, but the beginning of a truly special new chapter for Netwise, as we focus on our campus site, London East. We will be expanding this location significantly in the coming months – more on this very soon.
What’s next?
The biggest upcoming build work will be the onlining of Data Hall 3, the final hall in the current building at Netwise London East. Work will begin on this hall in the coming weeks. This will be the final component of Phase 2, before Phase 3 works begin in late 2024 / early 2025 – this will be a major development phase.
We hope to announce the next phase of works in an official capacity in the next few weeks.
Otherwise, we will continue to welcome new clients to our world-class facilities, along with the provision of assistance to existing clients looking to grow. This is an exciting time for Netwise, and we look forward to sharing more news with you very soon.
It’s been another very busy stint of work over at Netwise London East, as we continue to deploy Data Hall 3 and Data Hall 4.
While we’ve taken a relatively lengthy break from the #BuildBlog since the last update, the same cannot be said for the development schedule itself, which has been continuing at pace without pause.
Let’s get straight to the photo updates:
This all sits alongside a whole host of additional organisation-wide projects, which includes the full upgrade of our entire core network, across all on-net locations. This will see the staged upgrade of all routing assets on our core network, to cope with ever-increasing demand from our clients. Telehouse has already been undertaken, with our London East site to follow in the next couple of weeks. Equinix LD8 will follow shortly thereafter.
We’ve also had another major round of development work undertaken on our customer portal. This predominantly concerns the backend of the system, with a custom IPAM administration and deployment module now live. We also have additions to the client-side coming very soon, which will improve the booking, tracking and handling of deliveries.
We’re tantalisingly close to announcing some very significant expansion news, but we’ll have to hold back on that for a little while longer – keep an eye on announcements in the coming weeks / months.
We’re thrilled for you to meet Nathan Desmond, our Technical Manager.
Nathan joined us from a fast-rising career in critical technology for a major UK retailer (the one with the excellent, tear-jerking Christmas adverts!), overseeing their internal data centre operations. Nathan’s broad experience across multiple disciplines will assist in taking the customer experience at Netwise to the next level, as we continue to grow our dedication to true in-house expertise.
Nathan joined the Netwise family in late 2022, and has been making an incredibly positive impact on our operation ever since. His addition to the core Netwise management team came as expansion continued at our London East facility, taking Data Hall 1 to capacity, welcoming a single client to Data Hall 2, and building out Data Halls 3 and 4.
Nathan has already proven invaluable in the continued development of bleeding-edge technology in and around our world-class data centres.
We very recently deployed a major upgrade to part of our core network, at our Supernode in Telehouse North. Nathan naturally played an integral role in the success of this roll-out, from planning, to physical adjustments, through to completion.
You can expect to meet Nathan busy working across all corners of our data centre estate, keeping your mission-critical data centre services in tip-top shape. You may even find his expert input on the odd support ticket from time to time depending on the issue at hand.