Arup outsources data centre to Vtesse, to cope with growth

Global design engineering firm Arup is outsourcing the management of its data centre to Vtesse Cirrus facilities in Hertfordshire, and moving 500 pieces of equipment out of its own West London headquarters as part of the deal.

The equipment will be moved to the Vtesse facilities over a three-month period, as Arup tackles the demands of business growth. Arup needed to upgrade its existing data centre facilities but was facing significant refurbishment costs to overhaul its existing space.

As an alternative, Arup’s IT team evaluated data centre providers who could remotely support its resource intensive CAD (computer aided design) and CAM (computer aided manufacturing) users.

“Maintaining 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 London,” said Dave Thomas, head of IT of the UKMEA region at Arup.

The colocated suite will consist of 40 server racks and storage, estimated power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.5 - which is better than industry averages - and resilient high bandwidth data connections to various Arup sites in the UK over Vtesse’s national fibre-optic network. The diverse gigabit links also perform a disaster recovery function, ensuring that Arup does not experience downtime.

Consumer credit company Provident Financial also recently outsourced its data centre following a head office move. The contract signed with hosting firm Node4 came as Provident relocated its Bradford headquarters. Node4 will now manage Provident's existing data centre equipment in a new purpose-built facility.