After a few minor delays, the final odds and ends have now been completed.

Yesterday we performed a full end-to-end power test, checking out how all critical power components react to a mains failure.  I’m pleased to say that everything went perfectly.

With all the other critical aspects of the build complete, in particular the air conditioning and our diverse fibre links back to both Reynolds House and Telecity Williams, we’ll be installing new servers in Turing later this week.

Thanks to everyone who’s been watching our datacentre blog.  We’ll be switching the webcam off today as there will be live servers in here shortly.  If you’d like a tour of our facilities, please get in touch.

Our Turing House datacentre is now almost complete.  Below are some pictures, showing the air conditioning, UPS, and the first ten cabinets which were recently placed.  Just some finishing touches to infrastructure before we start moving kit in.

With the room nearing completion, our first APC UPS, delivered last week, has now been commissioned and is live.  This gives us 96kW of standby power, which will power roughly the first ~20 cabinets in our new facility.  Pictures to follow.

Now that the bulk of the heavy work has been completed, the room has been cleaned and painted.  If you watch our webcam you’ll see that the vented ceiling tiles have also been installed, which will form a hot air return plenum to the air conditioning units.

Our generator changeover testing has now been completed, with the room successfully switching over to generator when a mains failure was simulated.

After lots of heavy-duty work from various contractors, which are now complete, we’re having the datacentre professionally cleaned, both above and below the raised floor.  This ensures that when we start putting servers in there, that there will be a distinct lack of dust particles flying around!

The first part of our fibre has now been installed.  This gives us connectivity from the new Turing House facility, back to Telecity Williams, and also a number of pairs to Reynolds House.

This effectively puts Turing into our Manchester ethernet ring which now spans 6 facilities, including 3 of our own.

We use it to get Internet transit to our facilities, and also to provide VLANs to customers between sites.

The next stage, which will be completed next week, gives us a diverse path between Reynolds House and Turing House, meaning we can offer high-availability solutions between the two buildings.

An up-to-date map of our network is below.

Our first APC Infrastruxure UPS has turned up on-site.  This will give us our first 96kW N+1 power backup, which will feed the first ~20 cabinets of servers, with an average power density of 4kW per cabinet.

APC’s Infrastruxure UPS devices are not only incredibly flexible, but they have a very high power efficiency of up to 95%.  This means less power wasted at the UPS level, which is typically a source of inefficiency in a data centre.  The Infrastruxure units are superior to other UPS devices from the perspective of being able to intelligently monitor them remotely, including power consumption levels at cabinet level.

We’re thrilled to announce that our dedicated electricity feed from the utility company has now been made live.  This has been eagerly awaited by us, as really, a datacentre is pretty useless without power, but more to the point, we can’t do much of the testing of our electrical infrastructure without the power on!

Anyway, this caused a mini-celebration in our office this afternoon, when combined with the fact that we’ve been shortlisted for the Best Dedicated Hosting provider award at the ISPAs.

In what seems to be Manchester’s wettest week in May ever, our groundwork and electrical contractors have continued…we’re making a bit of a mess of  the Manchester Technopark at the moment, what with fibre contractors digging up the road, and the groundworks contractors digging up…well everything really!

Today our generator cables have been buried in the trench and the work on the generator compound is almost complete.

Fibrespan came on-site today to start the work to give us one of our diverse routes between Turing House and Reynolds House.

All these works should be completed by the end of the week.

Our building contractors have continued to brave the harsh manchester spring weather (will it ever stop raining?) to dig out the trench between the main building and the generator compound.  It’s a miserable job, but nobody ever said outdoors engineering work in Manchester would be easy…

If the rain holds up for five minutes, we might just take some photos…

This week’s been rather hectic with various works ongoing:

• Main power panel being connected up to the mains for power-on tomorrow (Friday)
• First two air conditioners being piped up to the roof where the external condensors will live
• Generator compound being constructed and trenches dug for the generator cables to go back to the building
• Cable trays being installed for network and power cables
• Metering being installed by United Utilities
• Other miscellaneous work too tedious to mention!
• Fire suppression and VESDA system being designed.

It’s been rather hectic with various contractors being on-site at the same time, but it’s nice to see the bulk of the work coming together.

Fingers crossed for the power switch-on tomorrow!

Our initial standby generator arrived today.  The containerised genset from Autogen has a Volvo engine which can provide 700kVA of power in the event of a mains failure.

It’s been enclosed in a compound in the car park of Turing House along with on-site fuel storage for ~ 5 days worth of continuous running at full load.

Pictures of the delivery below.

Today our building crew have arrived.  They’ll be building the compound for our generator and fuel storage, and also dig the trench for the power cables going out to the generator.

As it was a wonderfully sunny day today in Manchester, we thought we’d take some pictures, so please find the JCB-porn below.

Today, the latest in our series of ‘big toy’ deliveries has arrived, in the form of the main electrical switch panel.  This is basically the heart of the electrical system, and essentially a bigger version of the thing you’d find under your stairs in your house with all the fuses in it.

It takes the main incoming feed from the utility company, and then splits it into feeds out to our various UPS and air conditioning units.  Additionally it also houses the generator switchover panel, which basically tells the generator set when to start if the mains power fails.  So all in all, a pretty essential piece of datacentre furniture.

The panel is able to connect to our building management system, which means we’ll be informed remotely if there are any issues with any of the breakers, or if the main power has failed.

See pictures of the arrival below.

We purposely sized the new datacentre as compact as possible, to avoid having wasted space.  The primary reason has been to ensure that our new office suite, part of the same wing of Turing House, has as much space as possible to accommodate our growth.

This has a side-effect of meaning we can improve cooling efficiency by increasing the density.  However it does pose some interesting challenges when getting into the minutiae of the floorplan for the datacentre.  I spent most of today trying various combinations of floor-plans, to achive the optimum use of the space, whilst keeping corridors as wide as possible.

Our finalised layout will give us an average of 16A per cabinet, ~ 4kW, with an ability to take higher-density cabinets up to 20A, ~ 5kW.  This means better cabinet utilisation, i.e. no half-full cabinets, which tends to be the norm for most datacentres.

I’ve spent a lot of time working on the floor-plan over the past few weeks, but I think it’s worth the extra effort as it’s critical to the success of the facility.

We’re pleased to announce that the energy contract for our new Turing House datacentre has been signed.

The two year deal, worth over a quarter of a million pounds, sees us buying in renewable energy for our new facility, in line with our policy of trying to make a real effort to reduce our environmental impact.  You can see full details in our environmental policy.

The deal also fixes our energy prices in the new facility for two years, giving customers the comfort that no power price increases will come along for the next two years.

The new datacentre has been designed from the ground up with energy saving in mind, based on our previous datacentre building experience.

We invite customers to come for a datacentre tour to see what we’re doing first hand.

Today we’ve placed the order for our dark fibre connectivity, which will connect our Turing House facility back to both Reynolds House and Williams House, making it part of our Manchester dark-fibre ring.  We’ll have diverse connectivity between Turing and Reynolds, meaning customers can benefit from the resiliency of split-site hosting between Reynolds and Turing, with their own private dark-fibre to connect between the sites.

We’ll post more info and pictures when the work is complete.

Today our first air conditioners have been delivered.  They’re 2 x 80kW DX units from Airedale, chosen for their reliability, efficiency and the fact that they’re manufactured in the UK.

These, combined with the four external chiller units, which will be roof-mounted, will cater for the initial cooling requirement of the new facility.

United Utilities have today completed the power upgrade on the substation in Turing House to facilitate the power requirements of our new facility.

We’ll be connecting up the main feed cables in the first week of May.