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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

£60m datacentre to be built in Birmingham

A 10MW (megawatt) modular datacentre worth £60m will be built in Birmingham by March 2013 to provide storage services for high street banks, financial services firms, media companies, technology companies and small businesses.

The IT facility is built by Data city exchange (dce), the datacentre service provider and will be called dce Central Exchange.

It promises to use 70% less energy than traditional datacentres, according to dce, as it is purpose-built and uses efficient cooling techniques such as free air cooling and renewable energy sources to reduce the carbon footprint.

Mark Barrow, strategic director of development at Birmingham City Council, said: “Birmingham is increasingly being seen as one of the digital hubs of the UK and this type of investment will help further raise Birmingham’s profile across the rest of Europe.

“The datacentre will create significant employment opportunities across the city and help support some of the local businesses in the area,” Barrow said.

Purpose-built datacentres are in increasingly high demand due to strong growth in IT and data storage needs. This is being driven by growing business requirements for 'on-demand' cloud-based services as well as high-availability storage and high-speed networks.

Raj Mack, head of Digital Birmingham, said: “Access to world-class connectivity lies at the heart of a smart, connected city. Birmingham is increasingly being seen as a city with world-class digital aspirations, establishing itself as the innovation test bed of Europe.

“This addition to the city digital infrastructure could attract new businesses and secure an internet exchange for our small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and corporates, demonstrating that Birmingham is fast becoming the place to do digital business.”

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Wolverhampton Girls’ High School goes wireless

Wolverhampton Girls’ High School has installed wireless technology across its campus to enable its staff and students to use mobile devices in lessons.

Wolverhampton Girls’ High School has 750 pupils, many of whom bring in their own laptops, tablets and smartphones. However, the school didn’t have the infrastructure to support them.

They chose to install 15 wireless arrays from Xirrus, which was both cheaper than a fully-wired alternative and meant there were no concerns about damaging the buildings during installation.

“Wolverhampton Girls’ High School is set in a very beautiful and old building,” said Sharon Holness, assistant headteacher. “It was important for us to get a wireless solution in place that would be sympathetic to the surroundings.”

“The Xirrus engineers conducted in-depth surveys around the school and were thorough and professional.”

Each array has the capacity for 125,000ft2 of coverage, but with the number of buildings and obstructions, it was necessary to install more.

The deployment happened throughout 2012 with two phases, although Xirrus said each phase itself only took a couple of days.

Now, teachers have embraced the new network by making extra resources available to pupils online, which they believe has led to richer lesson plans and stronger interactions with pupils.

£60m datacentre to be built in Birmingham

The IT facility is built by Data city exchange (dce), the datacentre service provider and will be called dce Central Exchange.

“The datacentre will create significant employment opportunities across the city and help support some of the local businesses in the area,” Barrow said.

Hyper-V boost pushes Microsoft virtualisation closer to VMware

Microsoft has done a lot to boost Hyper-V but the improvements do not justify switching from VMware, according to Gartner.

Speaking prior to the analyst’s datacentre conference at Westminster, Gartner vice-president and distinguished analyst Carl Claunch said: “Hyper-V is a viable alternative to VMware. Microsoft has improved the product’s position.”

Claunch said Microsoft’s push to establish Hyper-V as a VMware alternative means lot of added features that used to cost more in VMware now come free as part of Hyper-V, which is bundled free with Windows Server 2012.

“VMware will now have to deal with add-on virtualisation functionality that is now a datacentre commodity, " said Claunch. He believes Hyper-V will damage VMware’s revenue.

“Microsoft is a sizeable, capable competitor, but VMware is fast-paced and can innovate quickly to avoid competition.”

However, he said: “VMware has strong a strong position on x86 servers for Windows workloads, so people don’t feel they are going to miss out by not moving to Hyper-V.”

While there is no need to switch, he added: “If you are beginning to move to the cloud then Hyper-V is worth a serious look.”

For instance, in a fresh virtualised environment, Windows Server 2012 is more advanced than VMware, because it is able to move workloads around more easily than VMware, according to Claunch.

He said: “Hyper-V is much more flexible. VMware requires advanced planning. The machine needs to be in a compatible part of the network.”

Performance improvements include Hyper-V’s ability to combine multiple network adapters for load-balancing, its large memory support and the way it handles storage.

He said: "Thin provisioning, data deduplication, used to require SAN. Hyper-V now allows direct attached storage to be used.” This is considerably cheaper and could make it attractive to SMEs.

In system administration, Claunch said Windows management tools can be used to connect to each server individually. "You can now manage groups of servers in one go on Hyper-V.”

Leeds to become home to a new £43m independent datacentre in 2013

Leeds City Council authorities have approved the construction of a network-neutral datacentre worth £43m to improve the internet connectivity and network infrastructure in the region.

The datacentre called DC4, will have a floor-space of around 120,000ft2 over two six-storey buildings, and will become the UK’s largest independent datacentre outside London.

It will be a carrier-neutral datacentre, which means it is independent of a network, software or hardware supplier and that multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will be able to take part in the datacentre, providing best value for businesses using the datacentre.

The IT facility will be built early next year by telecommunications company aql at a 3.14-hectare brownfield site in Hunslet, formerly the location of Leeds’ Yorkshire Chemicals plant.

“The new DC4 site will allow expansion room to support the data growth from the IT, media and mobile sectors – including the huge demands which 4G will place on the region’s infrastructure,” said aql’s founder and chief executive Adam Beaumont.

DC4 will be a large datacentre capable of housing 2,440 server racks serving the entire region.

The server racks will provide enough space for many of the larger ISPs to establish a firm and competitive presence in Leeds, according to aql.

Because it is carrier-neutral, DC4 will bring improved internet connectivity and network infrastructure to Leeds, benefiting both businesses and people in the city and the surrounding areas.

“This project will put Leeds, and Yorkshire as a whole, in a very strong position to fulfill their superfast broadband promise,” said Adam Beaumont.

The new facility will be a sustainable and energy-efficient datacentre.

Excess heat produced by the datacentre will be recycled and used to heat nearby buildings, and the land surrounding the site will be redeveloped and landscaped to create green spaces and civic amenities for local residents.

DC4 has the potential to make a huge impact on Leeds’ infrastructure and economy, and could help define the city as a major hub for digital business, according to Lurene Joseph, chief executive of Leeds and Partners, the agency responsible for attracting investment to the city.

“The new datacentre is another key milestone for Leeds as we work to make the city a centre of excellence across all aspects of digital technology,” said Lurene Joseph.