A DAY in the LIFE of the DATA CENTRE — NETWORK TOUR with ASH & JAMES!

[00:00:00] Speaker ?: *whispers* *claps* [00:00:17] Speaker 1: *coughs* Fantastic! Yes, right, next one. [00:00:24] Speaker ?: *claps* *claps* [00:00:28] Speaker 2: Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. This is your f***ing tank. It's held up quite well. You've not done all of them, have you? That's a breaky draw. That's a lot. Good bloody morning. Hi guys, welcome back to the channel. I'm Ash, this is James with the SDMs here at Custodian. We're following up on a comment from our last video from Fishbait 075 saying, a network tool would be great, explaining where your feeds come in from the outside world, how they get given out to the racks, and as you're carrying a neutral, how customers can pick and have the carrier of their choice delivered to their rack. So we're going to show you exactly that today. We're actually stood on one of our fibre ducts today, which is where some of our fibres come into the data centre, onto one of our data floors. So we're going to give you a quick tour of where they come in, different locations around the site, and then how they actually get to the data centre. This is just one of the three diversely routed BT ducts we actually have on site. They're all routed from separate exchanges to give us maximum diversity and security in the case of, say, outside works or something happening underground that's out of our control. And we've got, obviously, other carriers on site. We've got BT, we've got Virgin, Century Link. [00:02:21] Speaker 1: And we've got SSE. So what we'll do is we'll go and stand on top of another ducts, show you what the SSE ducts looks like. And, well, let's go and have a look. So this is one of the SSE ducts. SSE have chosen their own diversely routed map into the site. So there's more than one route in here. And this is only one of them. And then what we'll do is we'll go and take you inside of the DC and show you where the cables actually come inside because it looks a bit different. I can't lift up these for you, but I can show you what it looks like under the floor. So we'll see you in the DC. Cool. So we're in the DC now. What I'll do is I'll lift one of the tiles, as I explained outside, show you one of the fibres that's coming into the DC. So what you can see here is this is one of the fibre cables that comes in. It's a shielded armoured cable, the yellow one. And then it goes into this big black box. And in that black box is a splice tray. And then what happens is they splice that fibre in the DC onto the fibre coming outside. And then it travels through the DC to the provider's rack. I can't open it for you because it's not ours. But this is what it looks like, essentially. And there are multiple of these underneath the floor. But this was the easiest one for me to get to, to show you. So what we'll do now is we'll go to the provider rack and show you what a provider rack looks like and talk about how some of the fibre surfaces actually come in for them. So I was going to show you in front of one of the carrier racks. But currently we've actually got someone in at the moment working on a carrier rack specifically. So we're just going to come back to that later on in the video to show you. We're going to move on to the next bit now. So we're at one of our patching locations. And this location brings in some of the fibres from outside and custom fibres towards our equipment specifically. And so what this allows us to do is get between different sites within the data centre so we can connect to all the different rooms that we have. As we have quite a few floors, this is one of the essential parts to the infrastructure that we have here. So if we now go to some of our equipment, we can talk a bit more about how it eventually actually gets there. So what we have here is a newly deploys customer rack. And we're delivering some fibres to them. What we do is we drop the fibres into the rack from the trays above that you can see above us. We also drop copper into the racks as well. So depending on what the customer orders is, depending on what they get. And we can deliver any type of fibre, multi-mode, single-mode, and any kind of connectors they like. We just need to ask. So if you was coming from the customer rack to the carrier rack, all that happens is we run those cables up onto the trays and just take the most diverse route possible to the carrier rack. If they need to be diverse specifically, so they take two connections, we can also run the connections under the floor as well, or we can take a different tray route around the building. So it just depends on what it is that their requirements are. [00:06:04] Speaker 2: So in addition to what James is explaining, I just want to explain something about the different carriers we have on site. The carriers that bring fibres in, they pay to have roads dug up, fibres brought in, they light it at each end, they do all of that. But we can also provide that service. If you have a carrier that you need to get into your rack here in Maidstone, or even at one of our other pops, it's easy enough to do, because we can pick them up in London, for instance, and then using our dark fibre network at a fraction of the cost to get it back to your rack. Because we've got a dark fibre network, you could have, for instance, Colt on the end of this fibre, but Colt haven't had to dig up a road, they've not had to dig up our car park, they've not had to put their own rack in with their own kit to light it. And we can get it back to your rack, delivered on whatever presentation you need. It could be a 100 meg copper, or a 10 gig fibre. You know, we can present it how you want it, make it happen through our network, and the cost is significantly cheaper than you order in a circuit at like 10 grand setup, plus X amount a month or whatever. So it's always an option that you've got with us, using our dark fibre network. [00:07:15] Speaker 1: OK, so we're back now, after the engineers have been doing what they're doing. We're in front of one of the racks, for one of our providers. And as you saw before, underneath the floor, we had that large splice box, where one of those cables ends up underneath one of these racks. What happens is, they then take those fibre cables into further splice boxes within the rack, and they're then spliced onto another type of fibre cable, which then go into NTEs. Those NTEs are just like little cards that go into a multi-chassis, and you can pick up a fibre or a copper connection from those. And that's how the carrier delivers the circuit onto a piece of cable for a customer. So the same kind of thing that we do, where we deliver a cable to a customer with the service on, it's the same thing for the provider. So all we do then, is if there's an order, we literally just run a cable on top of those cable trays we showed you, from the customer rack to the service provider rack, and plug it in for them. Okay, so we're back at where we started off today, back at the BT duct. It's worth noting that Custodian have our own dark fibre that goes all the way up to London diversely. We actually light it ourselves using a DWDM system, so we have complete control over that diverse fibre connection up to London. In London, we have multiple sites across London itself, and we light each part of that dark fibre network between the sites. What that allows us to do, is we can connect whatever we like to those dark fibres, and get it back to Maidstone or another place in London. So, for example, if you're here in Maidstone, and you can't get connectivity from a specific supplier, we can pick it up in London for you, and then deliver it to Maidstone, however you need it to be, whether that be on a 100-maker circuit, 1 gig, 10 gig, whatever it is that you need, that's what we do. [00:09:23] Speaker 2: Okay, so you may or may not have noticed the satellite dishes sat just behind us here. These are actually connected to customers in the data centre. Some of these broadcast locally, some of them broadcast further afield, one of which is actually broadcast into Australia. So, we connect these up to customer racks. The coaxes go under the floor into their rack, and they do all their stuff with various bits of kit, be it a server, a skybox, whatever. They then connect it all up and just broadcast over them. So, it is something that are still in use. They're used today, and we've got more available if a customer ever needs them. We can also get more in, should the need arise. So, hopefully that's given you a bit of an insight into the network, the diversity, how the routes work, how fibres come into the building. If you've got any more requests like that, as you've seen, we're more than happy to kind of accommodate what people want to see. So, let us know in the comments below if there's anything else you want to see, stuff that we haven't covered already, so just check our channel just in case you've already covered it. So, yeah, thanks for watching. Leave a like, leave a comment, share it, and we'll see you in the next video. Cheers, guys. [00:10:31] Speaker ?: Thank you.