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Data Centre Tours

Host-it UK Data Centres

We design and operate our own
high specification data centres.

Milton Keynes

MKDC-0 Data Centre Tour

Air Conditioning NextNetwork

Cooling - Tier 4 (N+N) Cooling solution in place for maximum resilience.

N + N External units.	N + N CRAC Internal units	Energy efficient cooling

Blue feed external chiller (Free cooling units)	Blue feed internal CRAC units (Airedale Free cooling units)	Custom built cold aisle containment pod

Orange feed external chiller (DX units)	Orange feed internal CRAC units (Stulz DX back up units)	Pressurised floor with adjustable floor grills and also high surface area/ perforation doors.

All main data halls have two totally separate sets of specialist Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units each set is fed from a different power source and the external units located in different locations with pipe work taking totally separate routes. Each set of air handling units is able to support the full load of the area independently for maximum resilience and reliability.

This means that 50% of the air handling units in each hall could fail and the full cooling capacity would still be in place. For example if you have four primary air handling units in a hall a Tier IV specification facility would have five in total (one spare) whilst our data halls will have four spare units ready to take over if anything happened

We run a high air exchange rate and also maintain our cold aisle temperature at a maximum of 22 degrees (21+1 degree) making our facility ideal for various types of equipment including blade servers.

# Primary cooling systems.

Our primary cooling systems utilise free cooling technology for net energy efficiency. We have been using this technology since 2008.

# Secondary/back up cooling systems

For each primary unit there is an equal number of individual back up DX units always on standby and ready to be used if required. These can be operated individually so in the event that one or more primary air handling units failed the correct number of back up units will replace the duty until the primary units are repaired. As these are individual units it also increases the resilience as each back up unit is a self contained unit.

# In house expertise

We design, purchase and project manage the instillation of our air handling systems ourselves so we have a good level of understanding of the management and support of our systems however we retain a specialist company to maintain and support our systems under a four hour emergency response contract.

# PUE
We do not quote PUE figures and we have been baffled by some companies quoting very low PUE figures whilst running high cold aisle temperatures.It is not difficult to reduce your PUE however if you increase the source cold air temperature you run the risk of using more overall power as most equipment will have (less efficient) rate limited cooling fans and this can increase the net power consumed.

We have performed extensive real-world experiments over the past ten years with regard to this and monitored the net power used and this experience has led us to the above configuration being the most efficient when looking at the net power used.

PS: Ironically the more power your servers use, the more this will lower your quoted PUE as the comparison between gross power consumed by the data centre and net power available to the servers will increase to lower the PUE which makes this measurement more or less meaningless.

NextNetwork

Servers / Colo / Rack Space

Dedicated Servers
(Choice of Linux or Windows)

Colocation

Rack Space

Other