Connectivity

The Redcentric London data centre’s long history means the facility has many carriers and Internet providers present. Being a carrier neutral data centre gives you choice and makes it easy for you to interconnect between your colocated critical equipment and the carriers. Our facility is one of the best connected carrier neutral colocation data centres in London.

Choice of Carriers

By acting on a carrier neutral basis and not favouring one carrier over another, Redcentric provides equal access to all – which means you can negotiate the best communications routes for your data traffic patterns. Interconnections between the carriers and your colocated equipment are simple, cheap and quick.

Multiple Carriers for Redundancy

Using multiple carriers for your data communications needs allows for redundancy and resilience against failure of a carrier or of a route. For the data centre’s many international colocation customers, a choice of carriers with routes to distant countries – for instance routing to Japan through either or both of Russia and the USA is an essential consideration. A carrier data centre will always favour the carrier’s communications networks, whether they are suitable for the application or not. A carrier neutral data centre gives you choice and freedom.

Negotiating Routes and Prices

All carriers offer networks and access to their networks, but not all carriers have the same networks, nor the same pricing, nor the same service levels, nor the same latencies, nor the same international access, nor the same point-to-point connections. Colocation in a carrier neutral data centre gives you freedom to choose. If a carrier does not perform to expectations, a carrier neutral data centre allows you to move to another carrier. You can try out different carriers and compare performance at very low cost, since the PoP and the connection to the network are generally available inside the data centre, with only a cross-connect to your colocated critical equipment needed to start services running.

Carrier Neutral Colocation

Operating your colocated equipment from a good, long-established carrier neutral data centre, like Redcentric, enables you to you gain access to a whole world of telecoms and internet connection possibilities. You pick and choose what is right for you, unconstrained by the priorities of others, making changes as and when you choose and negotiating the pricing, service levels that are right for you.

Our clients wanted a data centre in the very centre of London. Redcentric has an ideal location, with easy access, just outside the “Ring of Steel”. Redcentric proved to be an excellent, reliable and trustworthy partner. They are very easy to work with and exceeded all our expectations.

Redcentric offers a sophisticated multi-homed internet Transit (IP Transit) service to its London colocation customers, using multiple, redundant services from several major carriers in the data centre. The quality and responsiveness of the internet transit service are excellent. Large volumes of voice telephony traffic are continuously carried – possibly the most demanding test of any IP backbone.

Using the Internet Transit (IP Transit) Service

Commit levels are from 1MB/sec to 1GB/sec, all fully burstable and uncontended. Internet addresses, both IPV4 and IPV6, are directly allocated under authority from RIPE. The systems are fully internally-redundant, even down to the delivery of services via two independent CAT5 or CAT6 cables or on fibres, fed from separate routers in different areas of the data centre, powered from separate UPS pairs, each 2N configured. Every customer is provided with a personal internet portal, allowing remote viewing of traffic patterns, both real-time and historic.

DDoS Mitigation on Internet Transit (IP Transit)

Malicious attacks on IP Transit services in data centres and elsewhere have become more common in recent times. Attackers attempt to flood the routers with meaningless packets, blocking genuine communications. All connections on Redcentric’s Internet Transit service from our London data centre have DDoS Mitigation available as standard.

Internet flexibility in the data centre

Using the in-house high-speed Internet Transit (IP Transit) in the London data centre gives you total quality, total reliability and total flexibility – of commit level, use level, and address allocation. Changes are quick and easy, you pay only for what you need and you can control and monitor both traffic and costs from your own desk in real-time.

Using the Internet Transit (IP Transit) service from the Redcentric London data centre gives you assurance of high quality, low jitter IP connections backed by some of the world’s major data communications providers. It is flexible, transparent, reliable and resilient. It puts you in control of your internet communications.

Being colocated in a good data centre does not stop malicious attacks from the Internet. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are becoming more common. The London data centre provides a service to Internet Transit (IP Transit) colocation customers to mitigate the effect of a DDoS attack.

A DDoS Attack

DDoS attacks are malicious and growing. The attacker may try to sabotage a web-based operation, to blackmail the operator or to extort money by denying legitimate customers web access. An attack is carried out by a number of computers each simultaneously making false web page requests to a server. Once the number of queued requests exceeds the ability of the server to deliver, the server can no longer receive genuine user requests. The web service has been denied to legitimate users by swamping the server with false requests.

Size of Attacks

Most DDoS attacks are quite small. A typical commercial web service hosted in a data centre may be able to deliver 50 to 100 pages per second. More than that and the software saturates. For a very large commercial operations, such as a retail transactional website, an attacker may use (or rent from a criminal gang) a botnet comprising many thousands of computers to overwhelm the site.

Redcentric DDoS Mitigation

DDoS attacks cannot be prevented, but their effects can be mitigated. The Redcentric DDoS Mitigation Service is available to all colocated users of Internet Transit (IP Transit) in the London data centre. There is no charge for its availability, only for its use.

How it Works

When a customer is attacked, he notifies the Redcentric 24/7 Network Operating Centre (NOC). The data centre NOC then reroutes all traffic sent to the affected customer IP addresses to an external Scrubbing Centre. False requests are dropped and valid requests are forwarded to the customer. When the attack ends, normal routing is re-established.

Internet Transit (IP Transit) with DDoS Mitigation

Redcentric’s IP Transit not only gives you high quality multi-homed data centre internet communications but allows you to react quickly and effectively to a DDoS attack. Nothing can stop an attack, but the DDoS Mitigation Service means you can minimize its effects and its cost to you.

Redcentric London data centre has its own diverse private dark fibre interlink to the Telehouse North data centre interconnection point in Docklands (THN).

Many international carriers have established a Point of Presence at THN, including some more obscure carriers who have only one installation in the UK. This allows you to interconnect quickly, easily and cost-effectively between our London data centre and THN at speeds up to 10Gb/sec.

London Carrier Interconnects

The THN Interlink gives Redcentric London colocation customers access to all the carriers present at THN. It also gives London Telehouse customers access to the carriers present at Redcentric and not at THN. It allows you to expand your range of carriers to choose from and to work with. It increases your options for routes around the world and improves your carrier negotiating options.

London Telehouse mirror data centre

Critical operations can be operated from two data centre locations, which mirror each other. The loss of either location does not then cause a loss of service to the customer. For geographic diversity, organisations with operations in Docklands often choose the City of London for a mirror site. This facility is ideally situated as a London mirror data centre, at lower cost than THN, connected through the private THN Interlink to London Docklands.

London data centre backup site

Many London data centre operations require a backup data centre to protect against equipment or failure. Many organisations operating their critical equipment in Docklands choose to backup away from the Docklands flood areas. Redcentric’s central London data centre is an excellent choice for a backup site, interconnecting to Docklands through the THN Interlink.

SIP Trunking replaces conventional telephone lines in a VoIP internet telephone system. It exists inside the data centre and connects the customer to the carriers.

Conventionally, the telephone exchange (PBX) is on the user’s premises. It is connected to the public telephone network (PSTN) on ISDN or analogue telephone lines. In an internet voice telephone system using Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), the PBX is colocated in a data centre, which also hosts SIP Trunking carriers. The PBX connects to the PSTN via SIP Trunks.

Scalability of SIP Trunking

VoIP running over SIP Trunks can be almost immediately configured or removed. So you can have as many or as few telephone lines (channels) as you need. Extra telephone lines could be added for a summer telesales campaign, then removed when it completes. Voice operations can grow easily with the business or reduce easily if needed.

We chose Redcentric because they ticked all the right boxes for a private suite for us. They were independent, had excellent global connectivity and were good on uptime processes. Their pricing was good and they were in the perfect central London location. A great decision and we couldn’t be happier.

Number Flexibility

Telephone numbers can be moved around the country at will. For example, you could move offices to a different town, keep the same numbers, lose no calls during the move and have no need to change the stationery. For business continuity and disaster recovery, hosting your PBX in a data centre where SIP Trunking suppliers colocate with you means you can move to emergency premises without losing calls, changing numbers or anyone outside even knowing a move has taken place.

Fewer Lines, Lower Cost

Multiple offices each have multiple PBX’s and telephone or ISDN lines. Bringing those PBX functions into a single internet PBX based in a VoIP data centre hosting SIP Trunking carriers reduces the number of lines needed. Using SIP Trunking in a data centre reduces the lines and the cost.

Voice and Internet Convergence

Voice and internet broadband are the same thing in the internet world. Little bandwidth is required for voice on VoIP compared with broadband internet access. There is no longer any need for separate connections to the user’s premises – only a single, diversely routed broadband connection back to the colocation data centre where the PBX and the SIP Trunking providers are hosted.

International and London Internet Exchanges

Most Internet Exchanges are national, neutral and not-for-profit. The main London peering points belong to LINX (London Internet Exchange) and LONAP. Others that can easily be reached from the Redcentric London data centre include the AMS-IX Internet Exchange in Amsterdam, the DE-CIX Internet Exchange in Germany, the France-IX Internet peering point in Paris, the Netnod peering fabric in Sweden and world-wide, MIX in Italy and TelX and NYiXX in New York. There are many other internet data exchanges to which colocation customers in the London data centre can connect.

Connections are available to public cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Google Cloud Platform. These provide a fast and effective way of offloading routine or peak computing tasks to public cloud services providers. Cloud providers, or colocation customers operating hybrid clouds, can spool up public cloud instances to take workload peaks, then spool down when the compute capacity is no longer required.

Single London data centre connection

Redcentric provides a single connection point within the London data centre, on a single contract, to many Internet Exchanges and public cloud service providers. Because the contract includes membership fees, data exchange at many peering points is economic, even when exchange traffic volumes are low.

Speed of data exchange connection

Port speeds from the London data centre are very flexible, typically 100Mb/sec to 1Gb/sec. Connections at 10Gb/sec are available by special request. Connections to data centre peering points can be diverse or non-diverse, protected or unprotected.

Using Internet Exchange peering points

You can extend the reach of your London data exchange dramatically by connecting from the Redcentric London data centre to other data exchange peering points around the world. A single connection, on a single contract, makes data centre internet exchange economic even with low internet traffic volumes in each exchange. You can connect to public cloud services to quickly scale up or down on compute requirements. And you can dramatically reduce the cost per data exchange transaction or cloud service access.

Cross-connects between customers, carriers and other customers are available throughout the Redcentric London data centre, on a simple fixed cost basis, regardless of cable run length. Most connections are from the customer’s hosted equipment to carriers. Some customers choose to locate mirror systems in different parts of the facility and have bulk interconnects between them.

Types of data centre cross-connects

Cross-connects can be copper or fibre. Fibre connects can terminate outside the data centre in street chambers and there are multiple entry points to the building from different roads for true fibre diversity, so your connections will continue to work even if the fibre in the street gets damaged.

Roof aerials or roof antennas have special cable cross-connect requirements for weatherproof cabling, which can be accommodated when needed.

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.

Inspection and Testing

All cross-connects are inspected, tested and quality assured before handover. The normal quoted turnaround time is ten working days from receipt or order, although this is often bettered.

Cross-connect costs

All cross-connects are charged on a simple fixed price basis, regardless of run length. The cost is comprised of an initial charge plus a small ongoing annual charge. Bulk cable runs attract a discount, especially if multi-conductor or multi-fibres can be run.

Flexibility with customer cross-connects

You have total flexibility. You can connect to all carriers, ISP networks and other customers with whom you want to have relationships easily and cost-effectively and you can be sure your cross-connects will go in quickly and work first time.