by Matt Seaton

London East Build Blog – Weeks 35 and 36

As we head towards the Holiday Season, we’ve been able to clear away a range of outstanding tasks on our list, setting things up nicely for the continuation of scheduled work in Q1 2021.

This short entry covers the items that have seen progress in the weeks leading up to the Festive holiday.

Weekly overview

We’ll be keeping this post relatively brief, however we’ve seen dramatic developments in a couple of key areas; cooling and lighting.

The entire first floor is now fully lit through the Klik system, which provides power to our overhead LED panels. This means that all temporary site lighting on the first floor can now be removed. Emergency bulkheads have also been wired up, ready for final directional label application in due course.

We’ve also built out our cooling system much further, with Data Halls 1 and 2 now very near completion, ahead of plumbing and cabling. The supplementary air conditioning systems are now also in place, pending commissioning much later in the project.

Lights
We lit up the first floor of the facility with full overhead lighting for the first time
Fire Stairs
Although our new first floor fire exit got installed a little while back, we haven’t yet shown it – here it is, providing a new fire exit route to the rear of the first floor data halls
Fire Stairs
Another view of the fire exit, taken from the rear access walkway
Cooling
Here we see the cooling system being married up to its custom blanking system
Cooling
Here we see the completed system in Data Hall 1 (pending commissioning), showing blanking panels and return-to-atmosphere louvres
Cooling
Here we see a set of coolers, and an interconnecting blank, which in due course can be removed to allow for the installation of additional cooling capacity
Cooling
A look at the now fully-situated cooling plant and containment system, pending some final low-level blanks, which now forms the zoning of the cold corridor
Cooling
This is the view of the cooling plant in Data Hall 2, which at this time is entirely populated with blanks, pending commissioning of the hall in due course
Cooling
A wider view of the blanking system in Data Hall 2, pending the louvre installation along the top edge

The past few weeks have been vital in driving the project forwards, as we continue to line up the various items required for the next phase of the build.

What else has been happening?

We have two new deployments underway in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, which have been in the works now for some time. These will reach completion in the next few weeks, with a large number of high-specification servers and high-performance connectivity rolling out in both locations.

These have both been top-to-bottom deployments for us, from consultation, hardware supply, project management, right through to provisioning.

We’re very excited to see these two new systems come online. Amsterdam will be a new location for Netwise, and the roll-out in Frankfurt sees us expand our existing footprint in Germany’s most important data centre hub.

We’ve also had confirmation this week of our plans for fully diverse fibre routes back to our core nodes in THN and LD8, which is great news. The ball is now rolling on installation of these lines, which will provide us with dark fibre access to our existing metro network. Our network will then span five key London data centres.

In other news, we’ve been working directly with TfL to update the content on our travel notice screen in reception at NLC, which will carry over to a the new system being installed at NLE. Look out for the updated screens on-site at our facilities soon!

What’s next?

We will be continuing with progress on outstanding items throughout the holiday season, ready for larger trade work to continue in Q1. This will most notably include the electrical portion of the project – both HV and LV – which will take us right through to the point of onlining the site.