On 29-Jan-2007, at 15:56, Andrew Gristina wrote:

I have two racks in London UK. The colocation is currently in London. The contract is up soon and most of the feet on the ground in the UK of the company is in the greater Birmingham area. So I'm interested in colocating about two racks of servers to Birmingham. I would need a cage if the space were shared.

If peering and choice of transit is your primary concern, then you might well find the best approach lies in staying in London and finding a reliable contractor who is local and who can do things for you there when needed. I've never heard of anybody acquiring peering in Birminghag. You can peer in Manchester at the MaNAP, although I'm not sure how well that theory stacks up in practice these days. In any case from Brum it's not much further to London than it is to Manchester, ignoring the traffic issues. Joe

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Andrew Gristina wrote:

I have two racks in London UK. The colocation is currently in London. The contract is up soon and most of the feet on the ground in the UK of the company is in the greater Birmingham area. So I'm interested in colocating about two racks of servers to Birmingham. I would need a cage if the space were shared.

We've colo space in Telford (not far from Birmingham) if you are interested and a small amount of space in Wolves but its shared only there.

What is peering like in the Birmingham area? Will getting multiple provider feeds in Birmingham be possible? It was easy in London.

Er, this is the sticks really. Closest peering point is NWIX/MaNAP or MCIX (or if you know the right people the 'Phantom Exchange') in Manchester. Our network connects to both Manchester and London so we could easily get you to these using MPLS... Let me know if you want more info J - -- COO Entanet International T: 0870 770 9580 http://www.enta.net/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFFvzOpR+KszLBLUT8RAvFgAKCAdRRHLvhWnoxx9lD+6Q3FZT06swCeJ036 yf+ozHgBBIL0M9xmhOETTb4= =VqW0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 12:56 -0800, Andrew Gristina wrote:

I have two racks in London UK. The colocation is currently in London. The contract is up soon and most of the feet on the ground in the UK of the company is in the greater Birmingham area. So I'm interested in colocating about two racks of servers to Birmingham. I would need a cage if the space were shared.

BT have a POP there (certainly our BT leased line into East Yorkshire bursts out there), so you stand a chance of getting BT & someone else for two transits, if you can find DC space. There's no (public) peering, so you would have to rely on something hacky like L2TP to get over to London for peering... yuck. Birmingham has a great Selfridges store, but is a bit of an IP frozen wasteland. If your London DC space is with Telecity, talk to them; they have buildings in Manchester (although I don't know whether they are full). Manchester has some public peering, and a reasonable concentration of carriers, so there's some chance of private peering. London has problems - the data centres with space may not be represented by the transit providers you like working with, or the exchanges you want to join. The well connected DCs are getting full, certainly in terms of power and cooling capacity. Good luck, I hope if you do move it goes smoothly. If you (or anyone else) wants to share recent experiences of UK hosting/colo projects, then I'll be in Toronto next week. -a