Will the Olympics be a drain on London?
In response to the recent predictions that the London 2012 Olympics is going to have a power drain on London-based data centres, Roger Keenan, Managing Director of City Lifeline expresses his thoughts.
The discussion about power outages due to the Olympics is a bit of a red herring. The utility providers will not commit to power they cannot deliver, and London outages over the summer of 2012 are likely to be at exactly the same level as any other summer. In fact, there is a case to say that the utility providers will be on their best behaviour and we may even see fewer outages whilst the Olympics are on.
Even if there were more outages, it affects only premises without UPS and diesel generator backup. Any reputable data centre will have UPS and diesel generator coverage to at least N+1 level, which means that data centre users will never know anything about power outages because the data centre will be able to run indefinitely with or without its mains feeds, and without the users being made aware.
As far as a London or not-London location is concerned, it’s horses for courses. For applications that are non-critical and don’t need high levels of connectivity or latency, there is sense in running them outside London, where costs are lower. For applications that do need those things, London is the only place to be. There is no simple rule – it depends on the application and the budgets available.
City Lifeline operates a carrier neutral colocation data centre at Lifeline House in Central London. The data centre is specifically designed for telecoms colocation, designated server hosting, disaster recovery, media and technology operations.
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