Manchester Data Centre invests £450k into improved resilience

Manchester data centre operator Teledata has invested £450,000 into improved resilience at its Wythenshawe colocation and cloud hosting facility. This investment further protects the company’s data centre infrastructure and guards against incidents that would otherwise cause downtime to critical customer hosted systems, applications, data and online presence.

Tuesday, 12th January 2021 Posted 3 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Three brand new diesel power generators, installed by UK generator manufacturer - CPS Generators, offer multi megawatt power generation capacity to support the data centre’s infrastructure against mains power outages. Should mains power fail, the generators and existing battery backup systems will be called upon to seamlessly protect all customer power with enough fuel on-site to sustain protection for an extended period of time. Advanced, automated synchronisation between the generators balances the electrical load and reacts fast in the event of failure of any of the individual engines – transferring power to the other engines without risk of power loss.

Through the implementation of sophisticated control systems which integrate with high capacity UPS battery backup systems, the firm has also been able to dictate a staged transfer of the site’s electrical load onto the new generators, reducing the potential for individual generator failure and thus improving the resilience of the data centre facility during main power loss situations.

Teledata director, Matt Edgley explains: “As a data centre, it is our job to keep the lights on - no matter what. As customer requirements change and the load put upon our facility increases, it’s vital that we expand and improve to meet those demands. Every second of downtime can potentially result in tens of thousands of pounds of financial losses, along with damaging reputational losses, so we’re committed to continuous improvement of our facility to ensure that we’re providing our clients with the most robust and resilient data centre services that the industry can offer.”

Teledata’s UPS systems take the majority of the load for a substantial period, allowing the generators to start, stabilise and intelligently accept the controlled transfer of the load of the site in a gradual manner to ensure a smooth transition. This guarantees zero downtime, and complete business continuity for Teledata’s clients.

Teledata recently became the first UK colocation facility to join the smart grid with battery storage, as part of a project to improve environmental efficiencies with low loss transformer and voltage optimisation, boosting the resilience of the facility by improving the shelf life of equipment, while reducing unnecessary energy waste and optimising the incoming power supply. In December 2020, Teledata was awarded the Data Centre Energy Efficiency Project of the Year Award at the prestigious DCS (Data Centre Solutions) awards, in recognition on this project.

Founded 10 years ago, the DCS Awards are firmly established as the premier annual celebration of the data centre industry, recognising the achievements of vendors, their business partners, their staff and their customers.

Teledata has also recently begun work on a £2Million 7000ft² data centre expansion project to meet demand.