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 transit providers are BT and Virgin Media Business. 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 copper services into the data centre for monitoring, telephony and alerting.
Redundant Cisco routers with active / passive HSRP failover gateways 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 the transit providers, and link between buildings. Core switches are connected together with 10GB interlinks.
- 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 too. 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, with redundant switches covering odd and even patch panel ports. Full Rack, Half Rack and Quarter Rack customers have 2 uplink ports included in the colo price.