Daisy Group Completes £1m Bomb Proof Data Centre Refurb

Communications firm Daisy Group has completed a £1 million upgrade of its Manchester data centre, which sits behind a bomb proof door.

The 12-tonne bomb-proof door sits where a former Bank of England vault was in Manchester’s city centre, according to the Manchester Evening News, which revealed the extra investment in the data centre has increased capacity by 50 percent.

Daisy Group has upped the number of servers in the centre from 2000 to 3000, whilst extra cooling equipment has been brought in, which should allow for another 1000 servers to be introduced at some point in the future. There are two-metre thick granite walls protecting the site as well, whilst 70 CCTV cameras monitor the centre.

Going deeper underground

The data centre is located 25 feet below the ground, and also features a 60cm bomb blast corridor around the facility for an extra layer of protection, according to a separate report.

“We are investing very heavily in enhancing our network to enable us to deliver cloud computing to our clients and store their data effectively,” said Daisy Group director Will Kennedy

“As more and more businesses go online, there is increased demand for secure services, which require more power… That generates a lot of heat, so we have also had to invest in our cooling systems.”

Although there are plenty of new servers, the centre will save £25,000 on electricity, compared to the site pre-refurbishment.

Green IT appears to be catching on again, with big name companies powering their data centres in innovative ways. Both Apple and Google have backed sites running off of pig manure.

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