Re: Birmingham UK colocation

[Andy Davidson <andy () nosignal org>]

On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 12:56 -0800, Andrew Gristina wrote:
> I have two racks in London UK.  The colocation is
> currently in London.  The contract is up soon and most
> of the feet on the ground in the UK of the company is
> in the greater Birmingham area. So I'm interested in
> colocating about two racks of servers to Birmingham. 
> I would need a cage if the space were shared.

BT have a POP there (certainly our BT leased line into East Yorkshire
bursts out there), so you stand a chance of getting BT & someone else
for two transits, if you can find DC space.  There's no (public)
peering, so you would have to rely on something hacky like L2TP to get
over to London for peering... yuck.  Birmingham has a great Selfridges
store, but is a bit of an IP frozen wasteland.

If your London DC space is with Telecity, talk to them; they have
buildings in Manchester (although I don't know whether they are full).
Manchester has some public peering, and a reasonable concentration of
carriers, so there's some chance of private peering.


London has problems - the data centres with space may not be represented
by the transit providers you like working with, or the exchanges you
want to join.  The well connected DCs are getting full, certainly in
terms of power and cooling capacity.

Good luck, I hope if you do move it goes smoothly.  If you (or anyone
else) wants to share recent experiences of UK hosting/colo projects,
then I'll be in Toronto next week.

-a