Bomb proof door

Communications company Daisy Group has completed work on a £1m upgrade to its Manchester data centre, which includes the addition of a 12-tonne bomb proof door.

The facility is located 25 metres underground, in a former bank vault in the city centre and as well as the bomb proof door also features a raft of new security measures. This includes 70 CCTV cameras, two-metre thick granite walls and a 60 centimetre bomb blast corridor that surrounds the data storage area.

It also features an uninterrupted power supply and three diesel generators on standby should the power fail.

According to a report in the Manchester Evening News, the work has also increased capacity by 50%, with the number of servers installed going from 2,000 to 3,000. There is also room for another 1,000 servers to be added at a later date.

The data centre was opened in 1999 and houses data for clients such as Manchester Airports Group, Racing Post and Trinity Mirror.

"Millions of pounds worth of transactions take place online every day and it is facilities like ours that make this possible," said Will Kennedy, corporate sales director at Daisy.

"We’ve all heard the horror stories and seen the millions wiped off the value of companies when technology lets them down, our data centres offer a cast iron guarantee of absolute security, power, speed and 100% availability – the watchwords of any business operating online today," he added.

The Daisy Group also operates data centres in London Docklands, Southampton and Jersey.

 

Further reading:

UK’s The Bunker opens ultra-secure data hall

Forget ‘green IT’, meet ‘greedy IT’

Over half of UK CFOs still fear data security in the cloud: SunGard

PEER 1 opens doors of new UK data centre