Rapid Expansion in London Continues

Our London location continues to be a popular choice amongst our customers and thus we are continuing rapid deployments to keep up with demand.
Standard Rack Deployment

Due to higher footprint costs in London, we opted for an extremely high density approach, having only 8 and 12 node SuperMicro Microcloud chassis, this allows us to get up to 144 dedicated servers per rack. Below is a breakdown of what a standard rack would include and its power usage.
Based on 800mm 42U rack with 144 x E3-12XXv5 CPU’s and 90% SSD based deployments


Pros & Cons
Pros

• Extremely high density, saving on space and running costs.
• Dual PSU’s allowing us to use A+B feeds and save on power usage
• Shared fans to save on power usage
• Passive coolers to save on power usage
• Easy access to sleds to allow for quick hardware replacements
• Central IPMI managment port which can be daisychained, meaning only 1 switch port is required to enable IPMI on 144 servers.
• In the event of chassis failure, blades can be hot-swapped to another chassis in minutes

Cons

• Shared resources like power supplies, fans and backplanes can mean that the whole chassis would go down in the event of failure.
• Cost — initial capital expenses are high, however lower running costs offset this in the long run.
• Because of the high density, the nodes can only take VLP memory whichis considerably more expensive than normal UDIMMS and is only manufactured by Crucial at a viable price point.

Below is a picture of 3 x 3U 12 nodes that were deployed in London today for new setups