A data centre hosting 70% of Europe’s live internet traffic must offer total reliability to its 500+ direct customers and 1000’s of indirect customers backing up their data here. Ruth Williams looks around Telehouse’s newest building in East London to see how their power is covered from every angle – and it all comes down to the batteries.
Telehouse West is the newest building opened in 2010, it joins Telehouse North and East on the site in the London Docklands. The site has grown since the North building opened in 1990 as the house of the London Internet Exchange (LINX) and as the online world has grown, so has Telehouse.
The size of the building and the amount of data held here is impressive; it is a nine-storey building with 19 000 m2 of space for customer footprints, each floor is capable of housing 1.5 tonnes/m2 of cables. There are three buildings, each with five floors of cabinets housing data that seem to go on as far as the eye can see.
Paul Sharp, the Senior Buildings Manager, explained eight milliseconds is the longest computer systems can withstand a power interruption before shutting down. If this place lost all power for any longer the consequences for its customers would be dire. And the bottom line is customers would leave.
“Telehouse is all about business continuity, we have to guarantee resilience of supplies and the services behind the supply. Protecting the customer’s load in the commercial world has to be worthwhile as a cost. I’d like to think we are the most resilient building in the country for telecoms, but I’m not sure how we’d measure that,” said Sharp.
Many companies don’t like to reveal where their data is held, for security reasons, but as the world’s largest data centre customer, there are plenty of household names with contracts ranging from £15 000 to £6 million. These include financial institutions, online gaming companies, telecom suppliers, IT companies, cloud service providers, media companies, content providers— any company with a large number of servers must be hosted somewhere.
All the data units and cabling, as well as air-conditioning, cooling and humidification to ensure ambient climate, require constant reliable power. This comes directly from the National Grid: 132KV is fed into a substation that converts it to a useable 11KV. For resilience Telehouse has dual power supplies from separate portions of the grid and can operate on either.
The substation, which has been operating for 17 months, is standard commercial equipment but is the only privately owned substation in the UK. The live wires run overhead and the room buzzes loudly, the air is ionised so you can practically taste the electricity.
Everything on-site is duplicated to insure against failures or allow for maintenance. Therefore there are two in-feeds, two substations and each floor has two transformers, two diesel generators, two UPS systems as well as two banks of VRLA batteries.
Nothing left to chance at Telehouse
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