Harbour Exchange Datacentre
Pipex Communications owns a datacentre in Harbour Exchange, Docklands, London. The location is within 3 miles of London’s Internet Exchange thus giving a very fast connection speed to the Internet. The datacentre is in a purpose built building that offers a high level of redundancy to keep the systems alive. The datacentre is manned 24 hours a day by experienced network engineers and also monitored by a remote site in Oxford, thus providing monitoring redundancy.
Fire Prevention
The Fire prevention system is constructed of strategically placed detectors (smoke and heat) creating ‘zones’ within the floor and ceiling voids. The system works on a ‘double knock’ basis, comprising ionization and smoke detectors. The system is linked/interfaced into the House Building System. Fire suppression is provided by a gassed based FM-200 Fire prevention unit, with a pressure of 25 Bar, release time 30 seconds, extraction time 30 minutes, alert to dump time 30 seconds. Extracted via smoke vents.
Power
The supply is distributed from the London Electricity Board diversely routed 11KV ring main. The UPS is a battery inverter floating 800KVA with an instantaneous electronic change over switch providing over 30 minutes of power while generators kick-in. Generators start within 20s of a power failure. The generator is a dedicated 1750 kva unit, with at least 48 hours worth of fuel held on-site and at off-site reserves. In addition to on-site stores, in the event of an emergency, tanks are refueled two separate fuel suppliers. Off-site reserves include access to our supplier’s 0.433 million litre reserve in case of fuel shortages. A customer may establish diverse feeds to their own racks.
Air Conditioning
Climate control systems monitor and adjust temperature and moisture levels, suites use tight controlled gas based air conditioners each of which is of a dual circuit design with two chillers, compressors and condensers providing two independent circuits for maximum availability. There is ample ‘redundancy’ in the calculation should a unit fail, within the current configuration of six 100Kw Airedale down flow units. Each unit delivers 30t/r cooling. Each unit is triply redundant, having three separate cooling circuits. Aircon units are N+1 redundant. The air conditioning is set to 20C and 50% relative humidity. Air conditioning is monitored 24*7, and automatically dials out for repair in the event of component failure.
Security
24*7 front-desk security guard. Access is via card-based security system. Fire-exits alarmed and monitored by CCTV.
Floor
The floor is raised with under floor moisture detection. The floor is rated at 1000kgs per sq meter.
Power Supply Rack
Each rack has two power feeds each fused with a 16Amp PDU which runs ‘commando style’ sockets these come from separate distribution boxes which are fed separately through the building from the UPS system, via armoured cabling. Triple-phase and 32Amp power can be installed to customer racks.
Datacentre LAN
The LAN is based on Cisco architecture with no single point of failure throughout.
Connection
THe network has direct access to LINX as well as several other major internet exchanges.
