Daisy Group completes £1m investment in bomb-proof data centre

Unified communications provider Daisy Group has added a 12-tonne, bomb-proof door to its underground data centre in Manchester, which houses critical data for clients including Manchester Airports Group, Racing Post and Trinity Mirror.

The new door is one of a raft of features implemented as part of a £1m investment programme in the data centre, situated within a former Bank of England bullion vault. The facility is 25 feet below ground, has 2m-thick granite walls and a 60cm bomb blast corridor surrounding the data storage area.

The Tier 3 “Server Bank” data centre, which was built in 1999, is continuously monitored by 70 CCTV cameras and access is granted only to authorised personnel.

“Millions of pounds worth of transactions take place online every day and it is facilities like ours that make this possible,” said Will Kennedy, corporate sales director at Daisy.

“We’ve all heard the horror stories and seen the millions wiped off the value of companies when technology lets them down. Our data centres offer a cast-iron guarantee of absolute security, power, speed and 100% availability – the watchwords of any business operating online today.”

The £1m investment has also been used to improve Daisy’s infrastructure, increase network capacity and improve energy efficiency. The company claims that, by engaging with the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres, it has managed to save £25,000 in electricity consumption.

The investment also increases the capacity of the Server Bank data centre by 50 percent, taking the number of servers from 2,000 to 3,000. Daisy has installed additional power and cooling infrastructure so that another 1,000 servers can be installed in the future.

Server Bank has an uninterrupted power supply and three standby diesel generators, which would be triggered in the event of a power failure. It uses six air conditioning units to ensure the temperature is kept at an optimum level, and is ISO 27001 accredited.

As well as Manchester, Daisy also operates data centres in London Docklands, Southampton and Jersey. All of the facilities are connected to Daisy’s national fibre network, based on a fully redundant Cisco architecture. The network is multi-homed, so has no single point of failure, and is connected to multiple 10Gbps DWDM MPLS ring networks.