Data Centers

Photos: A datacenter in the heart of a city

By // August 7, 2018, 6:41 AM PST // nickjheath

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  • City center

    With the vinyl store and pub tables, this may look like a typical east London street.

    But behind the tinted doors lies the sprawling Interxion Lon 2 datacenter, spread over multiple floors in an old Truman Brewery building.

    Where once beer was brewed data now flows, with the building housing almost 1,800 square metres of servers belonging to various companies, including some of the world's largest financial services firms.

    SEE: A guide to data center automation (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)

  • London links

    A view from the roof of the co-location datacenter, showing off its central London location.

    That position provides the datacenter's financial services clients with low latency links to London's major trading exchanges, market data providers and brokers.

    Proximity to these exchanges is important for clients for whom even a millisecond delay in trades being executed could lose them money.

    Lon 2 is one of three datacenters Interxion runs on the London site, serving more than 200 financial services organizations including investment firms, high-frequency trading firms, hedge funds, brokers and banks. The centers also offer fast links to more than 90 major carriers and ISPs, the London Internet Exchange and LONAP, as well as the Microsoft Azure, AWS, IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure public cloud platforms.

  • Inside the datacenter

    The datacenter is designed to support up to 2.5 kVA per square meter of continuous customer load, with servers occupying three floors in the old brewery building.

  • Private cages

    Some customers opt to house their servers inside private cages, which can be rigged with additional security and cameras to monitor access.

  • Redundant power

    Computers are supplied by two power feeds, each backed by an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) that can provide electricity in the event of an outage until the onsite generators kick in.

  • Keeping cool

    The servers and other computer equipment are kept cool using hot-aisle containment.

    The computers line the walls of an enclosed aisle with these vents in the floor. Cooled air is pumped through these vents and is warmed as it is pulled through the servers.

    The hot air rises into air handlers where it is cooled, pressurised and piped under the floor back into the enclosed aisle where the servers sit and the process starts again.

  • Datacenter with a view

    Interxion describes the three datacenters on the old Truman Brewery site as being 'central London's only datacenter campus'.

  • Outage protection

    Part of the UPS that guarantees continued power in the event of an outage.

    The datacenter has a PUE rating of 1.5, above average for the datacenter industry. PUE is a measure that reflects how much of the electricity used by a facility ends up powering the servers, rather than driving associated infrastructure handling cooling and power distribution.

  • Power up

    Across all three London datacenters on the Truman Brewery site, Interxion can support computers consuming 13MVA of power and offers more than 8,000 square meters of space.

  • Fire suppression

    The datacenter houses advanced smoke detection systems and fire suppression that can extinguish a blaze using argon gas.

  • Locked down

    Each datacenter in the campus is monitored 24x7 by CCTV and security patrols. Access is controlled using mantraps, contactless key cards and biometric readers.

City center

With the vinyl store and pub tables, this may look like a typical east London street.

But behind the tinted doors lies the sprawling Interxion Lon 2 datacenter, spread over multiple floors in an old Truman Brewery building.

Where once beer was brewed data now flows, with the building housing almost 1,800 square metres of servers belonging to various companies, including some of the world's largest financial services firms.

SEE: A guide to data center automation (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)

Related Topics:

Data Centers Hardware Virtualization Networking Storage Cloud

By Nick Heath

Nick Heath is chief reporter for TechRepublic. He writes about the technology that IT decision makers need to know about, and the latest happenings in the European tech scene.