Uptime and SLAs
Your Uptime is our Business
Running your servers on your own premises may be convenient but every second your website or database is down your company is losing money from lost transactions and wasted productivity. The only way to reduce the probably of downtime to an acceptable level is to build redundancy into your network and power infrastructure. However, the cost for many companies to implement backup connectivity, power and air conditioning is prohibitively high. We offer an SLA for 100% uptime on power and 99.999% on network connectivity. Your uptime is our business which is why with us you can be confident we have all the bases covered.
Remote Hands
When you have a problem with a server in a data centre, you may want your own technical staff to fix it. This is why ease of access and right of entry 24x7 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 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.
Your network can also be protected by state of the art hardware firewalls and IPS in a failover pair.
Power
Our data centre has two layers of redundancy to protect 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 servers from unforeseen power spikes but also provides the entire data centre with a constant power supply should the mains fail. 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 that maintenance can be performed on the equipment without any downtime.
We also have a stand-by Diesel Generator onsite which automatically starts up within seconds of a mains failure being detected. A 5,000 litre fuel tank plus a SLA contract (for refueling whilst the generator is running) mean we can run our generator at full load indefinitely.
Air Conditioning
A typical rack in our data centre will use up to 4KW of power, the majority of which is converted into heat – the equivalent of a 3KW electric heaters in each rack on 24 hours a day. Overheating equipment 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 manufacturers of data centre grade HVAC. As well as cooling the ambient temperature of the data floor, each air conditioning unit contains special filters to prevent any dust particles from being circulated around the room and transferred into your equipment. They also ensure a constant humidity of 45% which is almost as important as maintaining a constant temperature: an overly humid environment can cause water damage whilst a very 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 use a ‘hot and cold’ isle layout in which cold air is segregated in front of equipment cabinets and hot exhaust air is expelled behind them thereby eliminating the direct transfer of hot exhaust air from one system into the intake air of another system.We also use CFD (Computational Flow Dynamics) which allows us to predict hotspots before they occur and to take pre-emptive action.