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About Us

4D Data Centres is a specialist colocation provider operating from its own facilities in South West London. Everything we do is designed for the customer and to ensure the best level of service possible.

The management team and staff at 4D understand how important your IT infrastructure is and how critical it is for your equipment to be accessible 24 x 7 x 365. To that end we have designed the facility and our own processes around the customer as well as reliability. Our onsite engineers are trained in a variety of data centre skills as well as CCNA/MSCE as a basic requirement.

All systems within our data centres are monitored by our Network Operations Centre (NOC) 24 x 7 x 365 and you are able to speak to one of our NOC staff at any time day or night.

  

Your Uptime is our Business!

Running your IT infrastructure on your own premises may be convenient but every second your website or database is down, your company is losing money from lost transactions, wasted productivity and brand image damage. The only way to reduce the probability of downtime to an acceptable level is to build redundancy into your power infrastructure, network and environmental systems. However, the cost for many companies to implement backup connectivity, power and air conditioning is prohibitively high.

We aim for and currently deliver 100% uptime on power and better than 99.999% on network. Your uptime is our business which is why with us, you can be confident we have all the bases covered.

Remote Hands

When clients have a problem with equipment in a data centre, they will often want their own technical staff to fix it. This is why ease of access and 24 x 7 access is so important to many of our clients. However, on some occasions it may not be practical for the client’s own staff to fix the problem in which case some data centres offer what is known as a “remote hands” service where the data centre’s own technical staff will provide the necessary support. 4D provides this service but we think that “remote hands” understates the quality of the technical expertise we can bring to bear. We call our service Remote Hands and Skills™ and what’s more, the first 15 minutes use of this service each day is free so the occasional re-boot or hard disk swap won’t cost you a penny.

Connectivity

As a carrier grade data centre we are able to offer multi-homed connectivity through physically diverse fibre. In plain English, this means we have fibre connections physically entering our data centre from different directions and following completely different routes to the network providers. If any of these connections fails for whatever reason, the 4D Core Network automatically switches to the other fibre connection with no downtime or loss in performance.

Our network is also protected by state-of-the-art boarder firewalls and IPS (Intrusion Prevention System)

Power

Our data centre has two layers of redundancy to protect us against any power failures. The first layer is our UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) which not only cleans the power from the main electrical grid to protect your equipment from unforeseen power spikes but also provides the entire data centre with a constant power supply should the mains fail for a minute or a microsecond. Designed in an N+1 configuration, our UPS system is maintained and constantly monitored by UPS Systems Ltd and is subject to regular load tests. “N+1” means that redundancy is built into the infrastructure so that if one component fails, continuous operation is maintained and there is a hot standby (the “1”) if another component fails.

We also have an Scorpion standby Diesel Generator on site which automatically starts up within seconds a mains failure is detected. A 5,000 litre fuel tank alongside a four hour SLA contract for refuelling whilst the generator is running means we can run our Generator at full load indefinitely.

We are even geographically ideally placed for power provision as the main substation that provides power for the entire area is based just 600 meters away from our facility.

Air Conditioning

A typical rack in our data centre will use up to 4KW of power, majority substantial proportion of which is converted in to heat – the equivalent a 3KW electric heater in each rack. Overheating CPU’s can cause significant damage which is why we take the cooling of your servers seriously.

In our facility, we use ‘down-flow’ air conditioning units made by Airdale, one of the leading manufactures of data centre grade air conditioners. As well as cooling the ambient temperature of the data floor, each air conditioning unit contains special filters to ensure any dust particles are not transferred into your equipment. They also ensure a constant humidity of 45% which is almost as important as maintaining a constant temperature: a too humid environment may cause water damage whilst a too dry environment increases the chances of damage by static electricity.

Just like the UPS, the air conditioning units have been designed in an N+1 configuration which means if any one unit fails, the others will be able to continue to provide adequate cooling indefinitely. Finally, we utilising a ‘hot and cold’ isle layout where cold air is segregated in front of equipment cabinets and hot exhaust air is expelled behind equipment cabinets thus eliminating the direct transfer of hot exhaust air from one system into the intake air of another system. Combined with CFD modelling (Computational Flow Dynamics) which allows us to predict hotspots before they occur, we can safely say our Data Centre is cool.