iomart plc London

Colo-X analysis

With limited capacity, iomart are understandably focusing on selling on colocation ideally to customers taking other services from them. This data centre is fairly old, originally opening in 2000 as part of the 186K network and being in a converted office building has some physical limitations as a result. However its location in the heart of ‘telecom alley’ just north of the Liverpool Street area of the City and also due to its longevity means network options are fairly good. Today the iomart Epworth Street data centre is ideal for customers wanting reasonably small scale deployments in this location, ideally in conjunction with other iomart services.

iomart plc London facility description

iomart London data centre is located just north of Finsbury Square and Liverpool Street Station. It occupies the ground floor and basement of a converted six floor 1960’s office building. The data centre was built by a company called 186K, at that time the telecommunications arm of Transco – Britain’s gas network operator. After Transco was acquired by National Grid, who also had their own telecommunications business (Energis), the assets were disposed and lay dormant until acquired by iomart in 2007.

The iomart London data centre offers a combined net capacity of 1,520 sq m (16,000 sq ft) of high-quality, resilient and secure space. This is spread across four separate data halls:

1. Data Hall 1 = 493 sq m (5,309 sq ft)
2. Data Hall 2 = 534 sq m (5,747 sq ft)
3. Data Hall 3 = 274 sq m (2,957 sq ft)
4. Data Hall 4 = 216 sq m (2,328 sq ft)

Client access to all data halls is available 24/7, 365 days a year, via an access-control procedure. All facilities have CCTV monitoring the interior and exterior of the data centres. These CCTV feeds are also cross-monitored by the various NOC locations.

The site is manned 24/7 by an experienced staff of systems and network engineers at the on-site NOCs, with all services also monitored by a senior engineering team at the Head Office in Glasgow. The building has an integrated management system which links the physical security and environmental conditioning systems to a monitored control and alarm panel.

iomart London includes power supplies, generators and on-site fuel supplies, N+1 UPS devices, resilient air conditioning/cooling, and fire suppression with raised flooring. They are able to provision and install racks if required, or provide footprints for existing racks to be put into. In addition to providing colocation services, bandwidth and on-site NOC support (remote hands, etc.), iomart provide a variety of managed services at the data centre including managed network hardware, managed servers, storage and virtualisation services.

Technical stats