Telehouse plans £80m London data centre expansion

Telehouse Europe is to invest £80m ($162m) in a facility that will almost double the size of its London Docklands data centre. The development will see the construction of a new eight-storey, 12,000m2 data centre, dubbed Telehouse South, adjacent to its two existing data centres in Docklands. Construction will begin later …

[Anonymous Coward]

More secure...

Telehouse's security is definately not up to scratch...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully the new Telehouse won't have carpet...

I never did understand why they had carpet in a building full of electrostatic sensitive devices.

[Brian Murray]

logic or culture?

does it really make sense to locate major DCs in london - never mind docklands?

surely the real estate costs, plus the power/cooling/terrorism/etc dont add up compared to a more remote location?

[Anonymous Coward]

@london

there are plenty outside of london but when you have all your staf -in- london it and a vast majority of connectivity terminates in london you cant really have anything other than a DR site outside. (Don't even mention BSQ Maidenhead, last I saw I didn't count that was a DC as they still didn't have their Fire Supression installed!).

Anyone dealing with telehouse often should have guessed this was going to happen anyways, from the extra power they are bringing onsite already, the work thats been going on on the land outside for a while now it doesnt take a release from them to put two and two together.

And yes, there security isnt perfect, but nor is anyone elses.... Easynet? Level(3)?.... compared to them it's better than most, least you can't just walk in and help yourself to core networking kit!

[Anonymous Coward]

@ AC

**least you can't just walk in**

I beg to differ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will they be able to keep it up?

Telehouse power and other issues have historically had the site going down like the proverbial whore's drawers. Will the improvements improve this?

Paris 'cause, erm, it's obvious.

[plpl]

Carpets

@AC : TeleHouse is the champion of Datacenters located inside of big cities (they have two inside of Paris)

Since surface there is really expensive, the price is really expensive too.

For such price you should expect carpets and a jacuzzi for deployment workers to nurse their sore back.

Of course you can move your equipments to less pricey datacenters in the far far suburbs but they lack glamour and it's less easy to have journalists shoot impressive pictures of the CEO in front of racks full of blinking computers.

Paris H., because the TH1 datacenter in Paris is pretty close to several nightclubs.

[James Smith]

@ By P Henry

I had two racks worth of kit in Telehouse East in Docklands for over two years with no loss of power.

@ Anonymous Coward: Out of the DC's my company has equipment in, Telehouse is by far the best on security.

The Spooks style tubes alone make it uber.

[ben]

Redundancy

Yeah build it opposite the existing centres.

*Waits for natural disaster*

[Anonymous Coward]

Carpeting

The carpets are allegedly treated against static. It's probably also a throwback to when the building first went up and was used for office space for Japanese banks. The new rooms are vinyl-floored.

Carpeting would offer some sound-dampening, too. Ever used a mobile phone in a datacentre room full of servers?

[Mike]

our experience

the security is reasonably good, there are a few holes, I believe they are looking at implementing biometric access which should make things much better and easier to manage. Last time we went our steering wheel got wiped to check for explosives. We've not had any issue with power in there, if you want the best connections, low latency and the lowest hops to the largest numbers of UK customers then telehouse is where you need to be.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really news to most of us

Oh, someone has finally decided to announce it then. We've known this was happening for ages. I would have thought it more sensible to call it Telehouse West though, right? Isn't the area of land they have inside the compound... to the west (and uh.. opposite East)? Or are they going to take a leaf out of Telecity's book by having just half a dozen car parking spaces? :P

Security in Telehouse is not perfect (in how certain aspects work) but is far better than every other site I've been in in London, and I've been in most of the "public" ones worth mentioning, and it has vaguely proper perimiter fencing/security which is more than can be said for nearly every site in London, where the front door and a turnstile is the first and last line of physical barrier to the outside world. Just because in Telecity the security guard^W^Wcabling person^W^Wsingle NOC staff at night asks you to fill a form in when you take kit out saying what it is you're lifting doesn't exactly make their security any better, they just have a record that your kit got nicked instead. :P

When you consider that Telehouse pricing (even the latest announced comedy pricing for the soon-to-be-refurbished 3rd floor) is cheaper these days than some of the nonsense the likes of telecity have been quoting, there's no contest.

I would however be interested to see which sites these people who consider Telehouse's security to be so poor have been to.

[Anonymous Coward]

New rooms

Not all the recently refurbed rooms are vinyl floored. TFM15 is carpeted. TFM19 is vinyl floored though, and noticeably louder.

[Anonymous Coward]

@mike

they've had biometrics in for almost a year but never had it working properly.. the iris scanner is a joke:

stand closer. move further back. stand closer. move further back. stand closer. move further back. repeat ad infinitum.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ AC RE:Carpeting

I found it was not so much the carpeting that caused static as my trainers on the vinyl floors in the corridors. Pressing the lift button for Bytes was always a painful experience. I took to using a car key to short me to ground before touching anything.

Security-wise I never had a problem really as I was on the perm list and all our kit was in DFMs so we had double security.

I never did like the carpet floor tiles though as we were only ever issued with vinyl tile lifters. Was a nightmare getting under the floors in DFM50.

[Anonymous Coward]

3rd Floor Refurb

I think the 'comedy pricing' is a little strong, if you want to use a lot of power you'll run up a large electricity bill and cause heat that the room's systems have to dispel somehow. All that comes at a single price, and you've free 24hr support when you need it. Try elsewhere if it's not to your liking.

Biometrics are flawed, no question. It's doubtful that it'll be adopted until it's proven and reliable technology, and there's no sign of that happening yet with the hardware currently on offer.

Parking's a fair cop, if I were you I'd get your kit installed and running now because when building work starts the number of available spaces can only fall.

[Anonymous Coward]

telehouse power....

telehouse power is a bit of a joke. 3 power outages in 10 years and a power spike that fried TFM40.

[Brian Murray]

@london?

I think the point of putting the DC where the skills base is shouldn't really make sense anymore - given the capabilities for remore management and the level of skills now required actually at a DC.

However, the point re-the number of connectivity terminations puzzles me a little - is this something which happens out of culture/habit or is there a good reason why they have to terminate in london?

[Anonymous Coward]

**least you can't just walk in**

I laughed so much I wet myself... I also beg to differ...

It's a lovely little building that reminds me of amsterdam in the way that it looks like it's about to fall over... I've seen the fabled iris machine that no-one uses, I've heard the lift say "going down" fnaaaarr... and I've even stroked the black doors of {arhem... better not mention them}. Suppose I'd better be "anothermouse" for this post.

[Slaine]

now where do I know that name from...?

...free 24 hour support? wtf - does not compute.

...wonders - will the "new" facility will have sufficient power redundancy, that alone would put it head & shoulders above TH-east.

...wonders - will the data transferred between the two TeleHouses be by a coaxial cable or a telephone wire suspended across the divide at about 3rd floor height?

...wonders - just how BAD are the other facilities?

[pctechxp]

DC location and connectivity

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm a helpdesk person who supports networked services) but isn't Docklands where most of the submarine cables come ashore?

While its possible to blow fibre down existing conduit using compressed air surely this is too expensive and too much hassle for companies such as Level 3 to consider and so the only other option is leased lines/fibre from the likes of BT or Tiscali or even at a push KCom to extend their networks.

I've been past TH in Docklands which of course is very much out of the way so that in itself offers a measure of security whereas the facilities targeted by thieves have been in the main part of the city.

Surely the MOST secure location would be underground?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fire!

It's not the carpets or even the security I worry about in that place. It's the water based fire suppression above the UPS batteries in certain rooms.