Sheffield Data Centre Network

High capacity and reliable networks are essential for good customer experience. The Sheffield Data Centre has capacity for multiple fibre and copper services, and peers with multiple providers.

Internet Connectivity

 

Our carrier providers are Virgin Media Business and Level3. We have 24x7x365 support contracts with our providers, backed by Service Level Agreements.

Capacity for multiple fibre services allow us to give almost limitless internet capacity for our customers needs. We also have a number of BT/Openreach copper services into the data centre for monitoring, telephony, alerting, and customer-specific circuits.

Redundant Vyatta edge-routers with auto fail over BGP ensure continuous connectivity.

We are full members of RIPE, and have our own AS, routable blocks, and registered DNS servers.

Internal Networking

We have a three-tier internal network (Core, Distribution, Access) with a mixture of Cisco and ZyXEL equipment.

The core switches sit at the very top and connects to our transit providers, and link between buildings.  Core switches are connected together with 10Gbit interlinks in the same building, and 4x1Gbit links between buildings.

The distribution switches sit in the middle and connect access switches to the core.  These switches are deployed in pairs to provide primary and secondary paths.

The access switches are what customers connect to.  These switches have two uplinks, one to each distribution switch in their group.  Spanning Tree sets a primary and secondary path for live and backup traffic.

Rack Connectivity

Each customer rack has a patch panel with Category 6 cabling terminating into our comms racks. "Tails" to customer racks are 100Mbit to Cisco 2960 switches, or 1Gbit to ZyXEL switches. Redundant ports are available for servers with NIC teaming.