Tag / new

by Matt Seaton

My Netwise has a new look

Today we’re very proud to unveil the all-new My Netwise – a completely new customer portal interface that brings your Netwise services together in one secure, easy-to-use platform. Designed to save time and provide greater visibility, My Netwise is the ultimate management portal for looking over your infrastructure, support and account information.

✅ It’s everything Netwise, all in one place.

Built from the ground up with customer experience and operational efficiency in mind, the new My Netwise portal brings everything together in one secure location. Whether you need to raise and track support requests, view service information and utilisation, raise delivery requests, view your billing status, view scheduled maintenance details, or organise access to our facilities, the key information you need is now just a few clicks away.

This launch marks the first step in an ongoing programme of portal enhancements, with new functionality and features already planned. As My Netwise continues to evolve, it will become an even more powerful hub for managing your data centre services, giving you greater visibility, improved self-service capabilities and an even better customer experience.

If you're already a Netwise client, you can login to the new My Netwise portal and try it out for yourself now.

We’ll be taking a closer look at some of the key features of the new portal below.

Why build a new portal?

We’ve been working with our developers and designers since Q4 2024 on this new portal. A full rework of this nature requires close collaboration over a long period of time, with development work starting after several months of UI/UX design iterations, and feasibility studies to ascertain what can be achieved with existing data sources.

An entirely new user experience awaits

The previous portal put a lot of functionality in your hands, but the user experience had been lacking clear flow and user friendliness, which is something we’ve been keen to fix.

We’d often receive feedback from clients, particularly regarding the poor flow around facility access and user / contact permissions. This has now been fully streamlined, along with all other portal touchpoints, to unify the experience across all core functionality.

We also wanted to unify the look and feel of the portal with the new brand and design language that we implemented on our main website back in 2019. As part of this, we also have a second main site refresh planned that’ll further tie the two main web frontends together.

So what’s new?

In short, everything.

This is a total rebuild, so while we hope it’s familiar to use – thanks to both the much-improved UI/UX and the carried over functionality – it should also feel entirely new, due to the massive improvements made across the board.

Here are some key highlights:

🏠 A new home dashboard – the important bits

When you first land on the new My Netwise portal, you’ll have all of the most important actions and summaries available to you right away.

The new home dashboard presents you with four key areas of interest: My Services, Facility Access, Deliveries, and Help Centre.

Each block gives a short overview of your most recent touchpoints, and a button to raise a new action in that particular area instantly, without needing to navigate elsewhere.

👤 Users and Contacts are now Members

We’ve streamlined the previous Users / Contacts area with Members, which will automatically pull across from your existing Users list.

Members of your team can have both email notifications and facility access permissions set at a granular level, enabling better control over who can do what. You can now also set dedicated billing contacts that’ll only receive invoice and payment messages from the system, keeping this better segregated from the more feature-rich Members area.

📱 A new mobile experience

Our previous portal was tricky to use on mobile, which became a pain point for many of our clients who needed access to data and portal functionality on the move.

The mobile version of the portal is now a breeze to use, with some notable differences to the full desktop version, such as considerations for navigation reachability while browsing with a single hand.

🔔 Notifications and message history

There are now dedicated areas for important notifications, as well as historical messages and system emails.

Notifications provide portal members with a clear visual indication that something requires attention, which helps reduce reliance on system emails as the primary front line. And to expand on system emails, you can now see your entire history of system messages and emails

📊 Improved power and connectivity utilisation graphs

One of the most impressive visual changes comes in the form of the new power and connectivity utilisation areas.

Not only does this new format make for easier reading, but it also provides a greater level of detail, particularly around power utilisation for specific PDUs (or outlets for shared per unit clients).

🆘 Help centre – your new home for support

The new help centre is now your one-stop-shop for all support related touchpoints.

Here you’ll find three main areas:

Support, which is for tickets, with a much more user-friendly flow.

Scheduled maintenance, which covers active and historical maintenance and faults, and now also has functionality to filter by those only relevant to your deployment location(s).

Knowledgebase, which has been expanded and covers a wider range of topics, and which will be built out further over time.

Each block gives a short overview of your most recent touchpoints, and a button to raise a new action in that particular area instantly, without needing to navigate elsewhere.

A new base for the future

Having our new portal launched provides a great foundation for the next phase of feature additions, which are already in the works.

One of the first additions we’re planning is a Collections function, to work in the same fashion as Deliveries, to streamline the process for client returns.

Beyond this, we have longer term ambitions to integrate further data points from our monitoring platform, such as location-specific environmental readings, and even real-time PUE calculations.

Watch this space for new feature rollouts in the future.

Give it a try

We’re confident that our new UI/UX is intuitive enough to simply dive in and start using it, so why not login and give it a try!

You’ll also see a helpful guide to where to find the main features of the new portal when you first login.

If you have any feedback for us, feel free to open a ticket, or email your usual point of contact directly with any notes (good and bad welcome!).

by Matt Seaton

Announcing our new London East data centre

Today we are officially announcing plans for the opening of our brand new London data centre, set for launch in 2021.

The state-of-the-art 13,000 square foot facility will be named Netwise London East (NLE), and will join our existing estate of private and partner on-net data centres next year.

A preliminary facility page is now live on our website.

Exterior front elevation
Exterior front elevation

While we’re not releasing a full technical specification just yet, we can say that this will be a 1.5MVA build, housing up to 256 rack footprints across four data halls.

This will be the third private design and build project in our 10 year history, having completed our first small-scale London South build in 2011, and our 11,000 square foot London Central facility in 2016. The new site will interconnect with London Central, as well as primary points of presence across our growing metro network.

We will continue to push focus on hyper-efficient technologies, opting again to deploy an evaporative system for primary cooling, enabling a design capacity PUE as low as 1.05 – one of the lowest for a colocation facility anywhere in the world.

All energy will once again be purchased from entirely renewable sources, to match energy commitments at our existing London Central facility.

This will be inner London’s first new data centre for several years, continuing the trend of capacity growth inside the capital. We are one of just a small collection of independent facility and network operators investing this heavily in the city’s technical infrastructure.

This announcement comes off the back of a 12-month planning and design cycle, which involved several site options and design iterations being put through their paces. It’s incredibly exciting to finally reach the point of publicly announcing London East, and to break ground on what will be a long but very rewarding build phase.

Matthew Butt, Managing Director

London East will give us private coverage over another of London’s key data centre hotspots for the first time. The new facility is just a short distance from the large Telehouse Docklands campus, which stands as one of Europe’s most important interconnection locations.

This will also be our first foray into carrier neutrality, with NLE being the first of our privately-operated colocation facilities to welcome third party network operators into the fold. While clients will still enjoy access to our wide array of connectivity options, they’ll also be able to connect in with their own carriers on-location for the first time.

To say the entire team at Netwise is excited about the new facility is an understatement. Building bespoke data centres is what we do best, and what has enabled us to grow in the way we have, delivering a range of services to our customers that you simply won’t find anywhere else. London East will again take us to the next level in terms of capability and capacity, just as London Central did back in 2016.

Matt Seaton, Senior Manager

We have several key anchor tenants already in early discussions regarding space options at the new site, however details are being kept highly confidential.

We will be resuming our much-lauded Build Blog throughout the course of the project, detailing developments as works progress throughout the year.

Hard hat tours will be available in small numbers each quarter. We advise interested parties to request more information on when these will be available through the ‘Book a Tour’ function on our website.

by Matt Seaton

Build Blog – Build Room 1 Update

Our last official Build Blog entry was in July 2015, shortly after the soft-opening of our facility to existing clients. That was nearly 18 months ago, and it’s fair to say that the facility has evolved fairly extensively since then.

Anyone that knows our data centres will understand our obsession with quality and progression, which permeates everything we design and build here at Netwise. As much as the build room for Data Hall 1 functioned perfectly well, it’s fair to say that we are not huge fans of plain white rooms. The inclusion of the sound system in September was of course a welcome addition, however the space was still lacking some imagination.

Build Room 1 now adheres to our new technical design direction, which will follow suit in Data Hall 1 in 2017. The space has 360 degree wrap-around checker plate cladding, and a newly inviting entrance to Data Hall 1 – giving a greater indication that you are entering the primary technical space inside of the facility.

The old white space masked up for painting

The old white space masked up for painting

First coat of paint on both wall and door

First coat of paint on both wall and door

The finished paintwork

The finished paintwork

The first of the check plate being installed

The first of the check plate being installed

A look at the more intricate corner detail

A look at the more intricate corner detail

A look across the build room as the checker plate reaches completion, with work benches re-positioned

A look across the build room as the checker plate reaches completion, with work benches re-positioned

The space returned to normal function, pending final orange accents

The space returned to normal function, pending final orange accents

The space returned to normal function, pending final orange accents

The space returned to normal function, pending final orange accents

The space returned to normal function, pending final orange accents

The space returned to normal function, pending final orange accents

February 2017 will mark our first anniversary since officially launching to the public. Check back here in late February for a special Build Blog post; one year on, which will detail all of the changes to the facility since launching.