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Centro datacentre

Robin Balen, Managing Director, comments:

The next phase of expansion at the Centro datacentre is an exciting time for Gyron. Our philosophy has always been that customers will respond enthusiastically when presented with a state of the art datacentre, a flexible approach, fantastic customer service and great value for money, and we’ve been bowled over by the volume of positive feedback about our facility from both new and existing customers. The contract figures speak for themselves, especially given the challenging wider economic conditions.

The fit out works will add an additional 360kW of IT capacity within the datacentre at Hemel Hempstead, over 85% of which has already been contracted for. Work on the expansion space is due to complete on the 1st of June, exactly 1 year after the Centro facility first opened its doors to customer equipment.

Ben Miller, Operations Director, continues:

Our approach from day one when designing the Centro facility was to ensure that the datacentre infrastructure was completely modular. This has allowed us to rapidly expand operations at the site to meet unprecedented demand for our services, and also increase the specification of our services when needed to suit specific customer requirements. This next phase is no exception and we look forward to delivering this additional capacity shortly.

State of the art power and cooling systems have been specified for the expansion area, along with a custom hot-aisle containment system designed in-house, allowing a best-in-class target Power usage Effectiveness (PuE) of between 1.3 and 1.4, whilst simultaneously providing enhanced 2N redundancy on the power infrastructure.

For further details on this and future expansion space at the Centro facility, please contact the Gyron sales team.

-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/.

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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!

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• Centro generator snow start test
• Snow at Centro
• Snow!

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.

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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.

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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

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Why pay by Direct Debit?

• It’s quick and easy. Simply fill in the attached form. Within 14 days, the new payment method will be live on your account.

• It’s convenient. We will automatically take payment for the correct amount just before an invoice is due. You’ll still receive electronic invoices as you do right now.

• It’s safe and secure. All payments are covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee.

To set-up Direct Debit payments for your account, please email billing@gyron.net to request a Direct Debit Mandate form.

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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/.

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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.

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