About

City Lifeline, now part of Redcentric plc, is one of the longest established data centres in the country. It was founded in 1993, on the current site at Lifeline House in Central London. Initially, it specialised in Business Continuity services. The initial customers were financial dealing rooms in the City of London, hence the name “City Lifeline”. Some of the original founders are still shareholders today.

Over time, the telecoms colocation part of the business became dominant, particularly voice and data communications colocation. This led to City Lifeline being one of the best connected carrier neutral colocation centres in the country. As the voice telecoms industry changed, so City Lifeline changed and is today a London data centre specialising in cloud computing colocation.

The dotcom boom and bust

The company survived the boom and bust of the dotcom era in the late 1990’s, unlike many data centre competitors. A management change in 2005 brought in a team with new business and technical skills. The company consistently grew and increased sales, profitability and investment in every subsequent year.

Many large blue-chip clients have been customers since the 1990’s. Many smaller companies have prospered in Lifeline House. Some have passed into history, some have stayed small, some have grown and been bought out by much larger companies, some have grown to be much larger companies.

City Lifeline today

Today, City Lifeline is part of Redcentric. The company has adapted through three eras - from financial dealing room disaster recovery to telecoms colocation to cloud computing centre. With high availability, professionally managed and financially stable, the Redcentric London data centre will continue to be around for a long time into the future.

Redcentric understands data communications and has impressive clients with requirements just like ours. They offer extremely robust ISP and carrier connectivity from a secure data centre right in the heart of central London. As we grow, we know they will offer all the service, connectivity and power we need.

City Lifeline was one of the original founder members of EDCG, the European Data Centre Group. The EDCG is a grouping of independent data centre operators offering a common package of services to customers requiring consistent operations over multiple, geographically separated facilities. The companies within the EDCG are all independent of each other and independent of any of the big data centre operators. A common communications provider delivers reliable, redundant, fast communications between all the sites.

Redcentric uniquely provides the EDCG group offerings within London and inside the M25 orbital motorway that encircles London. Current operations of the EDCG are within the UK. It is intended that operations will extend into continental Europe in 2016-2017.

Multiple Data Centre Sites

EDCG suits customer operations which require multiple sites, with a single point of contact and a consistent delivery standard. For example, an operation may need a main facility and a smaller installation for back-up purposes elsewhere. Or possibly a pair of data centres mirroring each other and equally sharing the workload. If one data centre suffers a failure, the workload automatically moves to the other.
The EDCG approach is particularly suited to highly-distributed nationwide operations, where a customer needs installations in multiple geographic areas, to service local customers. EDCG can provide a consistent service across the UK, on a single contract, to meet the needs of many local distributors, agents or service operators.

Easy to Work With

The EDCG provides consistent service across all its member facilities. A single contract covers all the facilities chosen by the customer and a single Service Level Agreement that covers all the services provided to the customer. A single support desk, operational 24/7, acts on the customer’s behalf and resolves support issues within any or all of the chosen data centre facilities.

Resilient

The data centres making up the EDCG are each strong, established and independent. Between them, they have over 2,500 racks, 25MW of electrical power and can offer interconnection between the different facilities at up to 100Gb/sec. Their independence gives an unparalleled level of resilience – with proper structure, any problem with an individual site (even the financial failure of a data centre) will not affect operations.

If you need consistent, coherent, flexible multi-site data centre operations, there is no better approach than a single contract with the European Data Centre Group – EDCG.

Visit the website: http://europeandcgroup.com/

The Redcentric London data centre operates to the highest modern standards of Certification and Accreditations. The data centre and its colocation operations are regularly audited by Bureau Veritas and certified compliant to the standards laid down by the International Standards Organisation. The Certifications and Accreditations give confidence – in your security, in the London colocation operations and in their impact on the environment.

ISO 27001 Information Security Management

The London data centre is certified and accredited to ISO 27001:2013. The standard ensures best practice for security controls within London colocation operations to protect information assets and equipment.

Download – ISO27001 Certificate

ISO 9001 Quality Management

The ISO9001:2008 Quality Management standard applies to the internal operating processes of the London data centre. It sets out the necessary systematic control of activities to ensure the highest quality of service is provided to London colocation customers. The London data centre’s ISO 9001 certificate is in process and will be available in 2016.

ISO 14001 Environmental Management

Environmental concerns are addressed by ISO 14001. This standard certifies that the London data centre’s colocation operations actively monitor and reduce their impact on the environment. The London data centre’s ISO 14001 certificate is in process and will be available in 2016.

The ISO certifications demonstrate the data centre’s commitment to its London colocation customers to deliver information security, process management and environmental systems. The underlying operations are continuously measured, controlled and improved and are externally audited to the highest standards. So you can have confidence in the safety and security of your own operations.

Redcentric offers one of the best and most responsible Service Level Agreements of any London data centre. Whilst the technical teams try to ensure that everything always runs smoothly, every technology operation has to accept that, occasionally, things do go wrong. An experienced, responsible and professional data centre recognises that and provides targets and guarantees to its Customers around its performance levels.

Five Nines Availability – 99.999% Service Guarantee

Where the Redcentric London data centre provides power, cooling, cabling or communications, the data centre guarantees availability 99.999% of the time. Of course, the target to which everyone works is 100%. If the guaranteed service levels are not achieved, Redcentric compensates the customer, by an amount depending on the degree of the shortfall.

Measurement Period: Month

Notification and Escalation

A Customer can notify a problem or potential problem, 24 hours a day, to the Redcentric Network Operating Centre (NOC). The notification automatically starts a resolution process and allocates a specific person to investigate and resolve. If the problem cannot be quickly fixed (and most problems can), then an automatic escalation process leads ultimately to the managing director. Very few problems reach that level .

A good Service Level Agreement (SLA) provides a definition and assurance of performance by the data centre to the Customer. It gives the Customer good visibility of what is realistically possible, and a contractual guarantee of its achievement, without making promises which cannot be met.

City Lifeline, now part of Redcentric, colocation contracts are fair, flexible and easily understood. Costs are based on a combination of space and electrical power.

Colocated server or telecoms racks

For colocated racks in the data centre, Redcentric offers competitive standard pricing for quarter, half or full racks. Pricing depends on the electrical power allocation for each rack. There is a once-off installation charge, then a fixed, all-inclusive monthly colocation charge.

Private colocation suites

For private colocation suites, Redcentric makes a monthly colocation charge dependant on physical space allocation and electrical power allocation, plus a monthly charge for actual power consumed. Installation costs are dependant on the technical specification of the suite, which is usually built to the customer’s requirements.

Length of colocation contracts

Contract Terms can be fixed (excluding inflation) for any period between six months and five years. Payments are usually monthly, but can be quarterly or even annually in advance.

We chose Redcentric for its excellent connectivity. In twelve years in the data centre, we have never lost power. That’s an impressive demonstration of resilience and reliability. Redcentric is one of the best London data centres. We even use it in our own sales process because it’s so good!