[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Simon Waters wrote: > Gordon Henderson wrote: >> >> The hardest part about building a data centre in a rural location is >> assuring diverse routing of connections into the centre. Having setup such >> facilities in the past myself, it's not always an easy thing to guarantee. >> (And BT have been known to be liberal with the truth in the past too, but >> then Telewest were no better at the time!) > > I'm assured the Met Office have done it, also to Sowton. > > The NHS also has a data centre on Sowton (at least I'm guessing that one > of the unlabelled data centres is where they house the famed Exeter > System), although I don't know what network redundancy they have I'm > guessing it had better be comparable to other data centres. Oh, I'm sure there are some - but these 2 have had huge amounts of money and governmental pressure thrown at them. Your ordinary little hosting co. isn't going to have those luxurys, alas. Exeter (Sowton) is relatively well connected too - several telecoms companies have POPs there, so there are ways & means. (Although Devon as a whole is considered to be "rural" according to wifey who works for DCC...) > But as I suggested I'm not sure local data centres are that useful, > unless you really need some hardware that hasn't been turned into a > commodity. I'd love to have a well-connected place in striking distance - save me a trip to Sheffield every now and then, but I fear that costs would be high and bandwidth oversold. I know several in Bristol, but when I needed a place for my own stuff (6+ years back) they weren't well established. > I'm intrigued by the GigaCenter from IBM and friends. It is going to be > tough to compete with redundant hydroelectric power supply in terms of > greenness (even given the rainfall on Dartmoor). When you see folks > investing 9 figure sums in building dedicated data centers, and choosing > the location as the best places for data centers in the North American > continent, you realise that the world is pushing up the standards it > expects from a hosting company. Carbon neutral hosting is going to be > the name of the game. Dartmoor (where I live!) is an intersting area. Although I live in the 2nd wettest place in Devon (2nd to South Brent!) there's not much in the way of natural resources - I am part of a small group looking into this sort of stuff - we've found an old leat which may generate some 4KW ... However we need to buy/rent the land off the owner, get an abstraction license off the EA, etc, etc. The buy-in costs are high. There is an old mill - now part of the Dartington (Cider Press) Estate with a good working waterwheel, but when I looked (6 years back), it was in a bad state of repair inside. Looks like the Cider Press centre have made the effort though. Buckfast Abbey has 3 hydro electric sources - 2 fed off the Dart - they do pay an abstraction fee to the EA (Even though they put all the water back!), but they had cheap labour when building it all... I have a small river bordering my back garden, but the drop over the length is about 6 inches )-: > No doubt some folk have good reason for locating stuff in the EU, rather > than the US or Canada, and government organisations like the NHS or Met > Office probably have good reasons to keep systems physically in the UK > or its territories. But beyond that, banks have been prepared to put > systems into commercial data centers, and they have pretty stringent > security concerns. Okay they sometimes want them inside locked cages in > secure data centres. > > The real push will be local to your customers, not local to your > techies. The local technical know-how is usually minimal - cable the > KVM in / replace a disk - the other technical know how can flow down the > wire. Local in this sense is topologically close in the network to the > users, which is rarely going to mean Devon, and since we are talking > light speed, a few hundred miles is irrelevant. There was (still are?) plans for a data centre in Langage (or was it the Taymar science park) - the idea being that all the companies that move in there get high-speed connection to the one managed centre to put their local servers in, rather than the companies running their own AC/UPS/Generator rooms - not sure what's happening with that. Good idea for local business parks though - doesn't solve the issue of external (Internet) connectivity though. Ah wel - back to the grind. Todays task: Interface one of my PBXs to a gate opening system. This ones rather novel - has a telephone entry system (fairly common), but rather than run a telephone wire to the reception, they put a DECT base station inside a waterproof box next to the gates - 20m from the main building. So they have a normnal DECT handset inside the reception area, but now they want it extending into the PBX so they can answer the gate phone anywhere (and open the gate). Fortunately I have found one product (just one!) which will act as a DECT base and provide a standard analogue telephone socket... It's nice to have a job outside though! Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html