Redcentric London

Colo-X analysis

City Lifeline is likely to shift focus under the new ownership of Redcentric since January 2016. The site has historically been something of a telecommunications hub. It began operations in the late ’90s, acting initially as a DR site for the London Metal Exchange (LME), who pulled many carriers into the building. On the back of this connectivity, CityLifeline excelled as the new home for many old-style voice switches at the height of the telecommunications boom, as well as bespoke office/data floor solutions.

Looking forward, CityLifeline will act as the central London hub for Redcentric’s long-established Harrogate and Reading data centres. Given their focus on cloud and data solutions, a gradual shift towards this type of data centre deployment is expected.

Power densities will be light in the older areas of the building, but the more recently opened Shoreditch Suite on the uppermost fifth floor offers more contemporary densities.

Redcentric London facility description

CityLifeline (CL) began in the mid ’90s as a burgeoning disaster recovery facility for financial institutions based in the City. This was crucial for their transformation into a colocation operator, however, as these early clients brought their network providers in with them. This has meant that CL has always offered an impressive carrier list, especially for a site of this size. During the dotcom boom, CL attracted ready interest from both network operators and voice carriers trying to rapidly find homes to house their equipment.

As a result of its age, power per cabinet is quite limited, at around 10Amps per cabinet as standard. However, this is compensated for by the completely flexible nature of their solution, impressive carrier list, lack of cross-connect fees, and convenient location approximately half a mile from Liverpool Street Station.

There are some 80 clients on site today, ranging from a single cabinet up to 1,800 sq feet in size.  The building underwent a power upgrade in 2014 with a new 2MVA substation delivered, tripling capacity from the existing (and well-used) 1MVA historic supply.

Technical stats