The Daisy Group, a UK unified communications provider, has re-opened a data centre on the site of a former bank vault, having invested £1 million in the facility.
The data centre, which is 25 feet underground in the shell of a Bank of England bullion vault, is one of four which Daisy operates in the UK, with others situated in London’s Docklands, Southampton, and Jersey.
Daisy claims the new facility to be the "most powerful and secure data storage facility in central Manchester", as it comes with a 12-tonne bomb-proof door, a "bomb-blast" corridor, and two-meter-thick granite walls.
A spokesperson for Daisy Group said that there has been a data centre on the site since 1999. The company acquired the building in July 2009. The bulk of the redevelopment took place in the last 12 months.
Meanwhile, UK engineering giant Arup is preparing to move its self-operated data centre into a co-located faclity operated by by Vtesse Cirrus.
Over the next three months, Arup will migrate its existing infrastructure – comprising more than 500 pieces of equipment – from its existing West London facility to Vtesse’s data centre in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire.
The move was prompted by a need to expand Arup’s IT infrastructure to support business growth, the company says.
Arup’s primary concern in selecting a co-location provider was the performance of its resource intensive CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) applications. "Performance quality was absolutely vital if we were to consider moving our data centre operations from in-house to an external location – particularly one located outside of London," said Dave Thomas, Arup’s Head of IT for the UKMEA Region.
