Purveyors of fine quality datacentre services since 2000.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers for their support and business over the previous 12 months, and wish everyone a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year.
Instead of sending out Christmas cards this year we have again made a donation to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children where over 150,000 sick children are treated every year.
We’d also like to particularly thank our NOC Technicians and Security Officers who are staffing both our LHC and Centro sites on a 24/7 basis over the entire holiday period in order to provide our customers with the continuous support they’re used to!
As part of our extensive Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) schedule at our Centro datacentre facility, we run start tests on our generators every two weeks.
These generators provide stand-by power in the unlikely event of a utility outage on both HV supplies to the datacentre. We store enough diesel on-site to run the entire facility for around 4 days, and we have fuel resupply agreements with multiple fuel providers to ensure we can continue operating from generator power even in case of a prolonged outage.
We posted an image of the snow that had settled at Centro over on our Twitter page (over a foot deep in most places!), but as a generator start test was scheduled for today, we’ve uploaded the CCTV footage as an extra bonus:
Our generators are constantly heated and their starter batteries kept fully charged to ensure they are available as quickly as possible to provide backup power to our facility.
During this start test, the outside temperature was around -1C, and both generators started, synced and closed their breakers on to our main switchgear in 18 seconds, well within normal operating tolerances (we have battery supplies for our UPS system to last around 10 minutes before the generators kick in). The generators are run for around 30 minutes, during which time the on-board management computers are checked to ensure that there are no faults.
We’re pleased to announce that our Centro datacentre facility has been shortlisted in the Datacenter Leaders’ Awards 2009 for the “Innovation in the Medium Datacentre” category. The awards are judged by industry specialists, including engineers from Morgan Stanley, HP, Norland, Dell, and APC, and are sponsored by the British Computer Society, and the Green Grid.
Hot aisle containment in Suite 1 at Centro datacentre facility
The annual awards are organised by DatacenterDynamics, an information provider who host a series of 22 annual popular datacentre industry conference events worldwide. In 2008 alone, nearly 8,000 industry specialists attended the conferences.
Robin Balen, Managing Director of Gyron stated:
We’re extremely proud to have been shortlisted for this prestigious leadership award. We have received incredible feedback from both existing and new customers who have toured our state-of-the-art Centro facility, which has been designed from the ground up to host a wide range of customer equipment in the most efficient and scalable way possible. This level of recognition from industry insiders is icing on the cake for all the hard work our team have put in to developing the Centro datacentre.
For more details regarding the other awards and finalists, the DatacentreDynamics press release can be found here.
Gyron recently completed a major datacentre relocation project for UKDedicated, a leading provider of managed server hosting solutions. The project spanned 6 months, and concluded with the successful relocation of infrastructure supporting in excess of 200,000 websites to Gyron’s Centro datacentre facility in Hemel Hempstead.
High density colocation racks at Centro following successful relocation
Relocating even a small number of servers between datacentres is a task fraught with potential disaster. When such a project scales up to moving hundreds of servers and dozens of network switches from a live production environment, with strict time frames for acceptable downtime and zero tolerance for hardware failure, the project becomes even more challenging.
Fortunately, in recent years Gyron’s in-house team of engineers have relocated thousands of servers, plus hundreds of storage appliances, network switches, routers, firewalls and KVM units for a wide range of high profile clients.
Craig Robinson, Managing Director of UKDedicated, continues:
When we started the process of exploring new facilities to meet our rapidly expanding datacentre hosting requirements, the viability of the relocation project to move the considerable amount of existing live equipment from our two old locations to the new Centro datacentre was absolutely critical. Gyron were able to offer us everything we needed, from the high specification colocation facility itself, all the way through to the detailed planning and execution of the complex relocation project.
The project was complicated by the fact that during the relocation exercise, equipment was consolidated from two entirely separate datacentres, each with very different procedures and goods handling facilities. Ben Miller, Operations Director of Gyron, stated:
We started the project by thoroughly auditing the equipment hosted at both legacy datacentres, then sat down with UKDedicated and worked through various different relocation strategies. After reviewing UKDedicated’s priorities for the relocation and the types of equipment in use, and comparing this with our previous experience carrying out similar relocation projects, we agreed on a hybrid approach.
The older equipment in both legacy facilities was de-racked, transported to Centro on pallets then re-racked in to new cabinets in their new location. This had the added benefit of allowing UKDedicated to consolidate their older equipment in to fewer racks in order to take advantage of the high density hosting available at the Centro facility.
The newer servers were relocated by mounting the entire rack enclosures with all servers in-place on to a custom designed shock pallet, then crating the rack up and securely transporting it to their new home in the Centro datacentre.
The equipment was fully insured thoughout the relocation project by Gyron, and all hardware was escorted by a datacentre security guard during the move. Downtime was restricted to between midnight and 6AM at weekends only throughout the project in order to minimise the impact on UKDedicated’s clients.
Robin Balen, Managing Director of Gyron, concluded:
Completing this kind of complex datacentre relocation project on-time, on-budget, and with zero hardware failures really demonstrates our strength in providing integrated datacentre services. I’m proud of our team for their hard work over an extended period of time to pull this entire project together for UKDedicated.
Testing the shock pallet and ramp during dry run at Centro
Custom designed shock pallet with rack secured in place
Unloading rack crates at Centro, straight in to the loading dock
Unpacking server racks at their new home in the Centro datacentre facility
We’re pleased to announce that Gyron are now able to accept payment via the popular Direct Debit scheme.
Why pay by Direct Debit?
To set-up Direct Debit payments for your account, please email billing@gyron.net to request a Direct Debit Mandate form.
Gyron, a leading provider of specialist datacentre services, has been awarded the prestigious UK Police flagship ‘Secured by Design‘ certification for its state of the art Centro datacentre facility which opened in June 2009.
Ben Miller, Operations Director at Gyron states:
Our customers trust us with their most sensitive and mission critical computer systems and data. Our Centro datacentre facility in Hemel Hempstead was designed with industry-leading physical security in mind from the start, with iris scanners, 3m security fences, blast proofed windows, computer controlled motion detection, and much more, to ensure that this trust is well earned. We entered in to detailed discussions with the Police prior to any fit out work commencing at the facility, and we’re now gratified that following an extensive post-completion audit by the Hertfordshire Constabulary they have certified our compliance with the prerequisites for this award.
Gyron's 'Secured by Design' certificate for the Centro datacentre facility
To find out more regarding the relevant standards involved in the ‘Secured by Design’ certification process, view the various sections under ‘Current Standards‘ on the award website.
-ENDS-
About Gyron
Gyron was formed in March 2000, and offers colocation and a wide range complimentary managed services from two facilities — the London Hosting Centre in the heart of the London Docklands, and the Centro datacentre in Hemel Hempstead. Both datacentres are supported by 24/7 on-site teams of engineers and offer redundant power, cooling, and connectivity, all covered by 100% uptime service level guarantees. For more information, visit http://blog.gyron.net/.
Yesterday, the BBC had a detailed article on the front page of their news website about a new high speed fibre cable being installed in to East Africa. Along with the article, there were some interesting network maps, provided by Telegeography.
We have a large Telegeography world submarine cable map on the wall in the reception area of our Centro datacentre facility, which always attracts a lot of attention and scrutiny from the slightly geekier of our visitors. The maps are also available to download as desktop wallpaper.
Centro reception area, with large Telegeography network map
On the subject of submarine cable systems, there is a detailed and fascinating (and quite long!) article by the well known author Neal Stephenson available in the Wired magazine archives here. It’s certainly worth checking out if the subject interests you.
We are looking to hire a developer to work here at Gyron improving and extending our internal systems and scripts. You must have wide experience with PHP and MySQL, and some knowledge and experience with SNMP, XML, and interfacing with other code via APIs would be a bonus.
The role will be on a full time contract basis, based out of our offices in Hemel Hempstead, however there is also the possibility to work from home for some of the time.
Please send an email to jobs@gyron.net to find out more about the role. Don’t forget to include a bit about yourself and give us some examples of the work you done previously. Absolutely no agencies please!
Early on in the design stage for our new Centro datacentre, we recognised the importance of in depth monitoring, reporting and trending capabilities across the entire facility, both for troubleshooting and early warning purposes, and for analysing efficiency data.
As such, the facility is equipped with an extensive Building Management System (BMS), which tracks around 2,000 variables in real time, including the status of the fire protection equipment (zoned detectors, VESDA, and FM200), leak detection system, cooling plant (CRACs, chillers, pumps/inverters), and power infrastructure (branch circuit metering, as well as meters on every outgoing way on main and distribution electrical switchgear, UPS plant and generators).
This level of monitoring has recently had even greater importance attached to it given the upcoming requirements for cap and trade carbon taxes, allowing us to collect data on energy usage (kWh, kW, power factor, voltage, and current) on a per-rack basis, and report this to our customers.
Our Centro datacentre facility has been up and running for nearly 3 months now, so we thought it would be worthwhile doing some analysis on the efficiency of our cooling equipment. We have installed highly efficient Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units, with electrically commutated (EC) fans, and have also used high efficiency over-sized inverter driven pumps, and high efficiency external packaged chillers with a higher than usual return water temperature, so we were hoping for promising figures.
We’re pleased to announce that our initial analysis shows a PuE figure of 1.63! We are especially happy with this as our current situation with a large number of customers still populating their racks presents several big issues with part-load efficiencies on key plant equipment, particularly UPSs and Chillers.
The Green Grid specify:
Some preliminary work indicates that many datacenters may have a PUE of 3.0 or greater, but with proper design a PUE value of 1.6 should be achievable
We are continuing to improve the systems and processes in place at the Centro facility and hope to make even greater efficiency savings with additional investment in plant in the coming months.
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