New data centre opens for business

M247, the Manchester-based Internet Infrastructure firm, has announced that its second carrier neutral data centre is now fully open for business.

Work began last year when two new buildings, adjacent to their Manchester head office in Trafford Park, were purchased outright by M247 and knocked into one more versatile stand-alone configuration. Neighbouring roads were dug up in order to lay the new high capacity power cables needed to run the operation and feed their second dedicated sub-station.

Says Technical Director Chris Byrd, "Because our new building is right next door it was a convenient and relatively painless process to manage the transformation from office accommodation to state-of-the-art data centre. Valuable experience gained during the build of our first data centre meant that we were able to closely control the design and project management. This proved to be a very efficient solution as it enabled us to significantly improve many design areas and pace the whole project exactly to match our requirements. While our first data centre has some remaining capacity, we plan to utilise the combined space to reallocate resources that will improve efficiency and security for all of our customers. The opening of our new data centre was timed carefully to provide specialised secure server accommodation to a number of new high value business customers."

M247's new facilities have a 300 rack capacity and, considering their core business is in providing hosting and secure managed server accommodation, they say the new space will help meet the increased growth they're experiencing in these areas which they attribute to the ever-increasing demand from businesses for Internet solutions.  Fortunately for M247, the opening of the new data centre also coincided with their successful efforts to win ISO 27001 accreditation, an internationally recognised standard for the measurement of data security.

Chris Byrd comments further, "We have new sales and marketing plans that focus on filling the new data floor and we're keen to utilise the footprint as effectively as possible. For many years, our first building has won the coveted reputation of being one of Europe's most green and efficient data centres and, as we begin to gather detailed efficiency readings from our new building, we plan that this efficiency will be carried throughout our entire operation. A number of our customers have come to M247 specifically because of our green credentials. To us it's always made good business sense to use our power efficiently. Escalating electricity costs represent such a high proportion of the daily overheads of any power-hungry data centre and getting these costs under tight control means that we have much more room than most to sharpen our competitive edge. We don't believe in just buying green credits to offset our power useage, we work on genuinely using less energy than our competitors use. In common with our original data centre, our new one also exceeds Tier 3 conformity, a resilience scale that makes it possible to compare data centre quality".