The unity*dc B2B marketing blog: Service announcements
The woodchips are working just fine
Wed, 6th Aug 2008
Since our recent move to a new data centre powered by the Slough Combined Heat & Power (CHP) plant, we've had a number of comments about the woodchips. Will we now be offering Hickory-smoked websites? Most of the wood is willow, and comes from coppiced trees in the local area. Most local tree surgeons also supply to the CHP plant, so you never know, they might be called to fell a hickory...
The real news is that our servers are working fine in their new home - the new data centre has better, newer infrastructure, but with the same great team looking after the servers from Rackspace. If environmental credentials are important for your brand, why not save yourself 3 tonnes of CO2 a year with us?
unity*dc moving to new eco-friendly data centre
Mon, 21st Jul 2008
unity*dc is moving its servers with Rackspace to a new state-of-the-art eco-friendly data centre. We've hosted our servers with Rackspace for almost 4 years now as they're the only data centre provider that could effectively demonstrate how they can make their 100% uptime promise.
We're staying with Rackspace but moving to their new purpose-built data centre facility located in Slough Trading Estate. The new data centre is powered directly by the Slough Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant. The CHP plant burns sustainable wood chips and it also provides useful heat to nearby businesses to ensure that as little of the valuable energy as possible is lost. The new data centre facility itself uses new technologies to save energy on cooling, keeping energy use to a minimum.
Of course the data centre itself has all the usual backups in place - including enough battery UPS support to run the entire centre for over 10 minutes, backed by generators that come online in less than 30 seconds and can run the centre for days at a time. There are 5 separate high capacity internet links that come into the building from completely different points to avoid any problems from men digging holes in the street. Expect the same reliable service, but with a smaller carbon footprint.
The transition to the new data centre will take place this Sunday 3rd August to minimise disruption to our customers. If you are one of our customers and you will be affected by this, we will contact you personally about the move shortly.