A year on with Fusion

Providing security and cloud-based services to London businesses, Fusion required room to grow, enough power to cope with even the biggest customers and above all a London based solution.

Island site
When Fusion first visited the Volta Great Sutton Street (GSS) site, near London’s Silicon Roundabout, it was still hard hat territory. As Lee Norvall explains: “The Volta site was – and still is - like a small island, surrounded by pavement, covered in manhole covers from quite a few carriers.”

This island site is an important aspect of the data centre, as Matthew Dent CEO of Volta explains: “We wanted to own our own building and we wanted an island site like Great Sutton Street, because it allows us to have complete control over the perimeter of the building, and gives the maximum level of security.”

Location
Fusion has invested in the latest technology to ensure its network infrastructure delivers market-leading performance. It aims to provide telecoms, financial services, media and technology industries concentrated in the West End and City of London with fast, secure connectivity. These businesses cannot afford to be affected by latency, so proximity to the data centre is paramount in being able to deliver the best service.

Lee Norvall describes the search for the right data centre: “Before Volta GSS opened, we looked at all the leading options but they either had space but didn’t have the power, or power but not enough room for us to grow.”

“Outside London there were plenty of big data centres”, he continues. “However, the types of applications used by our clients – largely financial services and media companies - required low-latency, and that could only be provided if the data centre was close by.”

Power
Fusion’s cloud solutions run on rather large blade servers which have more memory than average, faster processors and more hard disk available. When each unit is at capacity it takes about 6kW of power. There weren’t many other data centres that could take that capacity, and cool it and maintain the environment.

The Great Sutton Street site had been a legacy data centre, run previously by BT. It therefore had fantastic connectivity - which is core to any data centre - and it had the potential for power. When Volta purchased the building they upgraded the power infrastructure which enables delivery of 2.8-9.6 M Watts and diverse feeds from two different main substations.

Innovations
This summer Volta introduced a specialist row-based cooling system that offers unsurpassed levels of flexibility and scalability meaning high density racks and traditional racks can be cooled to the same high level. The system allows Volta to reduce its power consumption and meet its environmental responsibilities, while ensuring equipment functions even through the hottest weather and as the data centre takes on more customers.

Customer benefits
Fusion has had an exciting and successful past 12 months while using Volta, having developed and launched its Virtual Data Centre services, becoming a Stonesoft/McAfee Intel accredited security partner, and achieved 43% sales growth. Fusion ranks amongst the UK’s top five providers of network connectivity, nationally and across Europe.

“With our cloud-based solutions and Volta we can offer something that is unique: A single cloud to desktop SLA”, says Lee Norvall. “We provide the connectivity to Volta, and we can provide private MPLS networks straight into the virtual data centre, or private cloud, and then they can host their Windows desktops, Windows servers, LINUX servers, turning it into a complete solution.”

“We have has a great year with Volta. The location is ideal as we can provide the low latency required and easily invite clients to see the facilities we use”, he summarises. “We have the room to grow, and the power provided allows us to be able to use our blade servers capable of running more virtual machines then conventional servers, and hence reduce our costs. We’re looking forward to more resilient and secure years to come with Volta.”

ABOUT VOLTA DATA CENTRES
Volta is a specialist developer and operator of purpose-designed, carrier-neutral data centres. Volta’s first high specification facility, located in Great Sutton Street (GSS), built to Tier III standard, is a stand-alone 91,000 sq. ft. data centre in immediate proximity to the City of London.

Designed to address the ever increasing infrastructure demands of businesses requiring a central London location, Volta GSS provides the communities on its doorstep – including cloud & managed service providers, media & content industries, the latency sensitive financial services and legal communities - with a highly flexible, secure and scalable IT and hosting environment.