As CEO of the Netwise Group, I thought it would be beneficial to give you all an insight into the development of our new data centre facility which is due for completion in the forthcoming New Year. I hope to write frequently to keep you up to date with our progress and to show you where your data will soon be stored.
To start with, you may or may not have been aware of the fact that we were planning on building a new facility for your data. This was decided just 6 months ago due to major inflexibility at our current premises; this almost forced the decision for us to move or for us to at least re-think the direction in which we wanted to head.
After several key meetings it was clear that a new facility was the most logical answer from both a service and financial point of view. From here we started to list in detail our requirements from which a specification could be produced. As always this is easier said than done. As I am sure you are aware, with technology constantly moving at such a quick pace it’s often difficult to try and specify accurately and to cater for both now and the future whilst keeping within strict financial budgets. During this process it was soon evident that we needed to keep our motto at the heart of our plans; speed, security, stability.
From this, several main areas arose from which solutions could be researched and discussed. This covered everything from the real estate side right through to the best method of air containment within the data centre; I hope to cover these in more detail in future posts.
The first major area was finding a suitable site/building. After much searching and number crunching we finally found a suitable area for locating our new facility. It ticks all the boxes; large amounts of available power, accessible redundant fibre connectivity, room for all the M&E equipment both internally and externally and plenty of room for both now and the future, but it is rather expensive! I will try to upload some photos in the near future for you all.
When completed we will have two state of the art server floors, each being able to accommodate over 1500 servers. As well as this, a new larger office space, meeting areas and a network operations centre will be built. Alongside this we are planning on providing designated server provisioning areas. This will give our both our internal technicians and our colocation customers a comfortable and practical area from which they can manage their servers and the associated hardware without being stuck in the middle of an uncomfortable server row. We want to encourage all types of client to visit our facility to show them firsthand what we do and how we do it, this should hopefully aid the building of long lasting and fruitful business relationships.
From here, we moved towards the major structural and provider services side of the build. Endless meetings with energy suppliers, specialist connectivity providers and data centre designers led us towards a final specification (if it is or interest to anyone then I can write up certain amounts of information in regards to this). We are now finalising our schedule of works and stage one should be under way within the next few weeks, fingers crossed!
And this is where we are up to. The build and kit out should progress very rapidly, we will have several teams working around the clock to meet our deadlines, I will try to provide photos whenever possible. I hope you have found this interesting and I look forward to updating you further in the near future. If you have any questions or comments then please don’t hesitate to get in contact, we would love to talk to you.