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Telehouse West (February 2009)

When I first started my career in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) industry, I worked for a fledgling business ISP who had 2 racks of core equipment located in the Telehouse data centre in London Docklands. At the time Telehouse consisted of a single building, now known as Telehouse North, and although a prestigous location it was also slightly chaotic inside. These were days well before DSL, before all companies had a presence on the web, and back into the days when you needed a modem to connect to the Internet along with a dialup account that you had to pay for. The ISP Freeserve then came along and provided free dial-up access accounts and then it was not long before British Telecom started to roll out ADSL to the masses.

During these heady days of the Internet and the dot-com era we maintained 2 racks in Telehouse with various IT equipment and I would often be called upon to travel across London and install new equipment or connect new customer leased lines following a BT installation. Telehouse was much more informal during this time and, although security was still tight, you could pretty much run your own cables within your racks, between racks in the same suite, and between suites in the building. From a tenant perspective this was wonderful since you had the flexibility to install and connect when and where you wanted but in the long run this was a very bad thing indeed. In fact there are the ghosts of poor cabling practice still preserved around Telehouse North to this day. Huge over-tight cable looms still exist running through suites with large Telehouse warning signs on warning of a near death experience should you try and sneak anymore cables in; while some floor tiles have a disturbing wobble as they balance on packed cable runs under the floor. I would hate to think what would happen should your connection develop a fault but rely on something in that mess because you have no chance of tracing your specific cable.

Telehouse West (April 2009)

Thankfully Telehouse brought everyone into line with strict cable policies and then made headway into power usage since there was either no restriction on how much power you took per rack or Telehouse had no methodology on policing the power draw. Many of our customers were drawn to hosting in Telehouse because they knew that their power usage was not an issue, compared to the new breed of data centres that were very strict on power use and charged heavily, but there was a flip side to this: From time to time there will be outages in a data centre and those abusing the power policies would suffer the most. When your rack of 42 servers experiences a power related outage then it can be hard work getting all those servers back online since you cannot just power them all on at once. Conversely these were the very same customers who would bleat the loudest when their faulty server blew the power to the rack and then could not be powered on for a length of time because they had some much over use in the rack. I used to shrug my shoulders and say the same thing: We warned you that your rack usage and density was dangerous from a service perspective but you did nothing about it because you were happy to cram as much into the rack as humanly possible just to increase your profit margin.

Telehouse West (August 2009)

Telehouse completed the East building in 1999, which embraced controls over working practices and power management, and the demand for data centre space continued at break neck pace. The Docklands area is now littered with data centres; such as Global Switch, Sunguard, Telecity, and Redbus. Providing power to these facilities and providing premier hosting environments has become very costly and there is now a demand for slightly cheaper hosting space outside London (coupled with a need for disaster recovery space far from their primary hosting locations). We are now moving into the virtualised data centre arena as being pushed by BT but now I have digressed from talking about the new Telehouse building.

In March 2009 Telehouse announced that a new data centre facility was to be built on the existing side, to be named Telehouse West, and since I walk past the site each day on the way to work, I decided to take some photographs of the site as the building progressed. The first months went by with very little visible progress although work was very much underway on the foundations and across the whole site. I still pop into Telehouse occasionally so I would also check out the view from the bridge that connects the reception building to the North building. The building work put more restraints on the available parking at the facility but once the framework started to go up then the building progressed at a very fast pace.

Telehouse West (April 2010)

As a ‘key decision maker’ within our hosting business I was then invited over to Telehouse West for a tour as the first data suite was being primed for live active service. The site was still very much a construction site so boots and a hard hat were supplied and we started our tour by viewing the generator room, which is the smaller squat building on the above picture. The room was much like a large cavern at the time with generators primed along one side and a large empty space where more equipment was due to be installed at a later date. The lifts were not yet if full service and nor was the walkway from the reception building, so we joined the builders in using the stairways to make our way up to the first data suite floor. Unfortunately it’s very difficult to glamorise a data centre and if you have seen one room full of racking equipment then you have pretty much seen them all; everything tends to be grey, there are various power distribution units scattered around, and you have the gentle hum of the cooling in the background (plus the not so gentle sound of running IT equipment if the racks are populated).

The new building conformed to everything I would expect from a data centre although the unique selling point of this particular new building, which has been latched onto by the IT media such as Data Center Knowledge and Slashdot, is that excess heat generated by all the IT equipment will be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community. That is not so much of a draw for people wanting to host their servers but it’s an interesting idea and good use of excess heat in a time when data centres are under even more scrutiny to do their part for the environment given the amount of power they use.

My only minor observations from the tour of Telehouse West:

1. Telehouse will allow tenants to select their own racks and install them based on a footprint and power cost. My experience is that you have to be very patient to operate this type of service model and you have to police installation closely. My personal preference is to provide a standard rack only, which is based on a healthy size to accomodate most IT equipment, and everyone has to have the same rack. From an aesthetic view this is much nicer since the suite becomes uniform and there are no odd shape racks nor different coloured racks splattered around the room. Again, this is just my personal preference where I am sure potential customers would much prefer the luxury to install their own purple racks as recommended by their equipment vendor.

2. Car parking at Telehouse has become very tricky in recent years and the new building has seen a temporary reduction is space, which has been negated by a temporary car park being setup on adjacent land, but once everything is complete then the overall car parking will be reduced from previous levels. I hope that something more permanent can be setup with the current vacant land adjacent to the facility otherwise I am sure there will be queues of traffic outside the entrance gates based on a 1-out-1-in policy.