If you are doing a research for yourself or your company on a decent data centre, which is close to you in Manchester and need high avaliablity requirement. This is a post for you. If you simply wanna web space or dedicate server, I suggest you stopping here, as the solution may cost something between £1000 - £5000 per month.
First of you may or may not know, people categories datacetres in different levels. The higher level mean higher reliability. TIA-942 Data Center Standards Overview defines them as:
Tier 1 - Basic: 99.671% Availability
• Susceptible to disruptions from both planned and unplanned activity
• Single path for power and cooling distribution, no redundant components (N)
• May or may not have a raised floor, UPS, or generator
• Takes 3 months to implement
• Annual downtime of 28.8 hours
• Must be shut down completely for perform preventive maintenance
Tier 2 - Redundant Components: 99.741% Availability
• Less susceptible to disruption from both planned and unplanned activity
• Single path for power and cooling disruption, includes redundant components (N+1)
• Includes raised floor, UPS and generator • Takes 3 to 6 months to implement
• Annual downtime of 22.0 hours
• Maintenance of power path and other parts of the infrastructure require a processing shutdown.
Tier 3 - Concurrently Maintainable: 99.982% Availability
• Enables planned activity without disrupting computer hardware operation, but unplanned events will still cause disruption
• Multiple power and cooling distribution paths but with only one path active, includes redundant components (N+1)
• Takes 15 to 20 months to implement
• Annual downtime of 1.6 hours
• Includes raised floor and sufficient capacity and distribution to carry load on one path while performing maintenance on the other.
Tier 4 - Fault Tolerant: 99.995% Availability
• Planned activity does not disrupt critical load and data centre can sustain at least one worst-case unplanned event with no critical load impact
• Multiple active power and cooling distribution paths, includes redundant components (2 (N+1), i.e. 2 UPS each with N+1 redundancy)
• Takes 15 to 20 months to implement
• Annual downtime of 0.4 hours
Are they too long? Let me short them as:
Tier 1: No redundancy for power/cooling. 99.741%+
Tier 2: Redundancy contains single point of failure (SPF). 99.982%+
Tier 3: Redundancy without SPF. 99.982%+
Tier 4: Redundancy for redundancy. 99.995%+
If your business is relied on internet, you should really think to get a Tier 4 or at least Tier 3. Or like what I suggest my company, main network in Tier 4 data centre and hot stand-by servers are running in Tier 2/3 datacentre.
Honest speaking, I dont think the datacentres inside Manchester city are very good.
IFL may be the biggest name in datacentre world manchester. It located in Manchester Science Park(MSP). Although you cannot buy rackspace form DC directly, melbourn.co.uk has VERY closed relationship with them, and there are also many resellers, such as 1st easy, C4L. Days ago, I thought these DCs are Tier 3 DCs, but I know the power outage happend on 26 May 2009 (133 minutes). I really think there are serious problems on their power infrastructure. TeleData house is separated from Manchester city, but it may be even worse than IFL on both power and connectivities.
The best datacentre I can find around Manchester is built and owned by UKSolutions. The north UKS datacentre is located in Studley, Birmingham which is reachable within one hour. and it is a tier 4 DC. UKS south datacentre is also a tier 3 DC. Another possible option, if you can wait, would be node 4. Its HQ is in Derby which also is a Tier 3 DC. There is also a in-building DC in Wakefield which is on side of M62(Manchester-Leeds) leeds side. But as I said if you can wait, Node4 said DC3(Wakefield) would open running in Jan 2009, but in the England best weather June, their project is still not finished, but seems has a long way to go.
Please do comment if I made anything wrong. Again it will be benifit all of us
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