Carrier neutral Central London colocation Tier 3 data centre for server hosting

Silicon Roundabout and Tech City – will it succeed?

The British government announced Tech City with great fanfare.  David Cameron visited it (it’s not very far from the Houses of Parliament!) on its nominal first anniversary in November and launched more bits of it – a “national Virtual incubator” for small businesses and an “Entrepreneur First” scheme to encourage young people to start their own businesses.  In these times of economic doom, gloom and failure, the government wants to see success in the areas of the future.  It needs to be seen to be encouraging success and it needs the economic growth that comes from new industries and the tax revenues that come from people working to create new products and services and customers buying them.

But will it work?  Governments and civil services are slow, political and have their own internal agendas.  The internet world is fast and vibrant and anarchic.  Companies grow, flourish, get overtaken, die and reform themselves in months, not over government lifetimes.  Is there a role for government? (Apart from providing free money, of course, but civil servants and politicians have a terrible record in selecting potential winners to give it to).

Hubs of innovation form themselves.  People with like interests come together because they like being with people who are like themselves and have similar interests and aspirations.  People like hanging out after work in bars with people who they regard as peers and respect and can learn from.  Often, there will be a catalyst – something which is not directly participating and is itself unchanged by the experiences in its surroundings.

Technology-focused universities often fulfil that role and Cambridge in the UK and Stanford in the US are classic examples where hubs have spontaneously formed around them.  So do manufacturing companies, where designers will leave a company and set up down the road making something similar, be successful at it, grow, then have their designers leave, set up down the road and make it happen all over again. 

So hubs of innovation are organically created.   Occasionally, governments can make it happen – an example is the Canadian government’s successful efforts in creating an aerospace hub around Bombardier in Montreal.  But such examples are rare and often happen because the government has a lot of buying clout, like buying planes and trains from Bombardier.  Mostly the creation of successful hubs is spontaneous, organic and not predictable, plan-able or controllable.

Although governments can rarely create such hubs, they can facilitate their growth by smoothing the way, flattening obstacles that might block progress, making it easier for start-ups to get commercial credit, promoting the benefits of an area, making people aware of the opportunities and so on.

And that is what the British government is doing with Tech City (or Silicon Roundabout as everyone used to call it before the marketing professionals got involved).  The government didn’t make it happen, it did that on its own, as like-minded people chose places with cheap accommodation and trendy bars and restaurants where they could do fun things.  Everybody wants to be at the party, so others joined them.  And Silicon Roundabout was born. 

The government is promoting it, for example by the appointment of Eric van der Klieij as CEO of the government-sponsored Tech City Investment Organisation.  Exhibitions dedicated to it are starting to appear, for example the new “Digital London” exhibition at the Excel Centre in March.  The need for extreme bandwidth has been recognised and Virgin Business Media showcased a 1GBit/sec feed into THECUBE in Shoreditch to show what can be done.  Existing business offering relevant services, such as City Lifeline’s London colocation hosting centre just off the Old Street roundabout find that their services are more in demand than ever as a result of the government’s interest and promotion.

The fact that the internet industries and the London colocation and London data centre industries are so fast-moving is in some ways an advantage.  The nature of the products is fleeting, with every new development being quickly overtaken by its successors and products flowering, dying and being replaced.  Once people are in a stimulating and exciting environment where that happens, and where the supporting infrastructure, such as fibre in the ground and London data centres, has already been attracted, they will carry on doing it in the same place because that is where the stimulation and excitement is.  So they will stay in the innovation hub unless they have a reason to go elsewhere.

Activity creates activity and success creates success.  Google’s well-publicised move to set up a London office near the Old Street roundabout and near the London data centres bodes well for the hub.  So does the success of organisations like TechHub, actually on the Old Street roundabout, running networking events, training and bringing together people who can spark off each other.  Others are trying, notably Dublin, but Dublin is more about tax than technology.  To get to be viable, a hub needs size and momentum to get to critical mass, easy accessibility and a flow of new people.  London does that and the London data centre and colocation industry is a significant contributor.

So the overall conclusion is very positive.   Government cannot make successful innovation hubs, but government does have a role to play and seems to have identified it correctly and be playing it well. All the necessary conditions are there for Tech City (or Silicon Roundabout for us veterans) to be successful, but it will be successful or not on its own and on its own terms.  Let us look forward to seeing what happens over the next few years.

2012 – The Year of Indecision

As we enter the year, economic uncertainty is the dominant factor.  No-one knows what will happen to the Eurozone, but it is likely to be either countries surrendering economic power to align with the German view of discipline or a partial or full breakup.  The US has elections in a highly emotional and partisan environment currently paralysing decision-making, China is showing signs of its never-ending growth stopping.  Governments world-wide are cutting costs to try to pay back the money they borrowed when times were good.  In such times, companies do not invest in new and speculative projects.  They hoard cash, reduce debt and try to make their existing investments last a bit longer until the way ahead is clearer.  That is the overall outlook for 2012 – indecision and delay.

Amidst all this gloom, failure and depression is the London colocation and London data centre industry, which is projecting a 30% increase over the next five years.  The London data centre industry has several things on its side – the growth of cloud, the increasing digitalisation of almost everything, the ever-decreasing cost of bandwidth, the drive to outsourcing, the need for low latency communications with guaranteed packet transit times, and the green agenda which favours specialised operators over in-house data centres to mention just a few points. 

The Cloud will continue to be a driving theme during 2012.  Although not at all new (IBM offered it as “Business on Demand” twenty years ago and we all used to call it “Remote Hosting” before Marketing thought up the idea of “The Cloud”), it has very clear and big advantages for the software vendors.  Instead of selling software as a single package plus support, the vendor can sell it repetitively every month, and, over the life of the package, make far more revenue and profit for a given product development.  At the same time, the customer’s data is held by the software vendor in a data centre, not the customer, which gives the software vendor a bigger lock-in of the customer.  The user gets flexibility and scaleability, and lower costs for appropriate applications.  Takeup in 2011 was slower than predicted, so we can expect more marketing promotional spend, more hype and more takeup of Cloud in 2012.  Even the Cloud resides somewhere physical eventually, and Cloud creates further demand for colocation data centres in which ephemerality hits the silicon.

Bandwidth will cost less at the end of the year than it did at the beginning, just as it has in every recent year.  The days of £150 per MB seem like a distant dream now, but they were only five years ago.  Hardly ever has a mature industry seen its selling prices decrease by over 90% in such a short time.  At the same time, continued heavy investment is needed to keep up and agile networks using ROADM’s are likely to become more prominent during the year. The anecdotal evidence is that the growth of bandwidth is equalling the decline in price (ie halving the price doubles the demand) so the carriers are surviving, but being CEO of a data or voice carrier will continue being one of the world’s most terrifying jobs in 2012.  Those that survive can look forward to 2013, when consolidation of the carriers is likely to get more ferocious.

Quality of performance of bandwidth is becoming more important.  In particular, latency is becoming a more critical and more public issue.  Financial trading houses running algorithmic trading can win or lose millions on being a millisecond ahead of or behind their competition and will seek out carriers and London colocation facilities and London data centres in the right geographical locations to gain that little advantage.  Equally, consistency of latency is important for real-time applications such as telephony where packets have to arrive with consistent time delays so they can be reassembled in the right order.  Quality and location of delivery for bandwidth will grow in importance in 2012. 

Inside the data centre, cooling is likely to be the biggest single focus of 2012.  The market is demanding that data centres become greener and waste less energy on cooling.  At the same time, electricity is becoming more expensive, which incentivises the London colocation operators to invest in more efficient cooling to reduce their costs.  Free-air cooling will make big strides in 2012, using cold air from the outside to mix with recirculated air from the inside when conditions outside are cool enough to do so.  It is not a simple as it sounds, and needs careful control of all the environmental parameters to save worthwhile money whilst ensuring that warm, wet air is never passed into cool servers (which would create dew inside the servers).  Evaporative cooling is another technology which will make good progress in the data centre and in hosting in 2012.  This involves passing outside air through a wet blanket to cool it before passing it to the servers (a practical application is a bit more sophisticated).  Again, the same care is needed to ensure that the servers never get wet.

Server technology will continue to advance during 2012.  The new ASHRAE temperature ranges will start to come into use, which means that cold aisles will get hotter and cooling bills will decrease.  Unfortunately, this really only applies to data centres where the facility controls the selection of the servers.  In a commercial colocation environment, the colocation operator has no control (or even knowledge) of what equipment the customer will install and it will be a very long time before cold aisles at 27 degrees C become the norm.

So 2012 is likely to be a troubled and uncertain year.  One in which the London data centre and London colocation industry continues to grow and one in which technology continues to advance, but also one with a lot of frustration as projects are cancelled, delayed and scaled back.  We can all look forward to working harder and writing more technical proposals to achieve the same levels of business - and that applies not just to the colocation and data centre industry, but to its customers and to its customers’ customers.

About City Lifeline

City Lifeline is the leading independent carrier-neutral colocation data centre in central London.  Lifeline House is situated in an ideal location, just outside the central London Exclusion zone, in the emerging Silicon roundabout district. 

With some of the best connectivity in London, City Lifeline provides a secure, reliable and resilient home for telecoms, networking and server hosting.  Its customers have access to the fastest, carrier diverse networks in the UK connecting across the world.

The data centre offers a first-class, flexible and personal service coupled with the security, reliability and engineering team to match.   

For further information about City Lifeline visit: www.city-lifeline.co.uk

Hisham Abougrad is the London colocation competition winner!  Hisham (on the left in the picture) is a DBA researcher  from Chelmsford, Essex.  He is shown receiving his prize from Lance Wright, Head of Sales for City Lifeline's London data centre.  We wish Hisham every success in the future and hope that his new iPad contributes to his success.

What do customers value when choosing a colocation provider?  City Lifeline ran a survey asking customers and potential customers for London colocation exactly what they lokked for and what they valued in a London colocation provider  The results are on the attached report in .pdf form.

Above all, Security is what colocation customers value - knowing that their valuable mission critical equipment is physically safe from damage, disasters, theft or vandalism.  Customers want to be sure that their equipment is safe and will stay safe and that they can sleep at night without having to worry about it.

A wide choice of carriers in a carrier neutral colocation data centre is what comes next.  Customers want to be able to choose the carriers that they deal with, and to have a wide choice of carriers available to them.

Price comes in at third place.  Price is always important, but the message from colocation customers is clear - price comes after security and connectivity when choosing a London colocation provider.

The survey is here:

Data centres offering colocation and hosting to the Unified Communications market need to be able to show that they have a wide choice of carriers and diverse routing from the facility to all parts of the world.  Low latencies are often critical, as are guarantees on the consistency of latency.  City Lifeline's colcoation facility in central London offers 22 carriers PoP'd in the facility and wide connections to the world.  City Lifeline will be showcasing London colocation and London hosting capability to the Unified Communications market at the Unified Communications exhibition at London Olympia between 6 and 7 March 2012 on Stand 109.  Existing customers and industry specialists who want to learn more are welcome to visit us there.

We have a winner for the competition run on the stand at IPExpo 2011!  The winner was picked at random using a random-number generating program from all the people who visited us on the Stand and left us their details.  the winner is:

***   Ian Poole of RFIB Group!   ***

Ian has already been notified of his win, and will be presented with a new iPod Nano.  Congratulations, Ian.  Please come back and see us next year, although we can't guarantee you will win again!

We look forward to seeing everyone again at next year's IPExpo 2012.  We will be on Stand C13 next time, in with all the communications, telephony and IP companies.  See you all there!

Over the 19th and 20th of October 2011, City Lifeline exhibited at the IPExpo exhibition at London's Earl's Court 2 arena.  The exhibition was immensely successful, and many more people became aware of City Lifeline's London colocation and London hosting options.  The rate of takeup was so great that the stand team ran out of stand give-aways before the end of the first day and had to arrange for new supplies to be couriered in from City Lifeline's offices near Moorgate in London.

This article was published in the February 2011 issue of "Consulting Engineer" under the full title of "Cooling in the data centre - an end-user view".  The author is Roger Keenan, Managing Director of City Lifeline.  The article discusses how electronic equipment is cooled in today's world, rather than an ideal world.  The question of whether efficiency matters is discussed, and then the article looks at some ways of improving matters.

Download the magazine article in PDF format by clicking on the icon below:

This article was published in "Cable & Satellite International" magazine.  The author is journalist Philip Hunter.  The article contains comment and contribution from City Lifeline.  The article discusses the ways in which Cloud computing can enhance the flexibility and cost structure of digital content providers.    City Lifeline proposes an alternative to full-blown Cloud, with content operators remotely hosting and delivering content from localised private London hosting centres.