The challenge
Being located in Cheltenham, yet needing such a resilient and high capacity connection to London proved to be quite a challenge. It’s paramount that Safehosts’ gaming and media customers have a fast and reliable connection and, as such, when choosing a network between London and Cheltenham, it needed to guarantee that latency and jitter were at a minimum.
A competitive tender proved that alternatives either didn’t have the technical capabilities of Neos Networks – notably the ability to guarantee the level of bandwidth available – or were vastly more expensive. It was Neos Networks’ ability to offer this combination of technical expertise, security and peace of mind that ultimately won out.
The outcome
We delivered a 10Gbps optical wavelength to Safehosts’ Cheltenham data centre connecting it to Telehouse North in London. The uncontested connection means that Safehosts is secure in the knowledge that there will be no capacity constraints and that they have mitigated the risk of downtime. Instead, it can be completely confident that the level of bandwidth paid for, is the level of bandwidth available at all times. This is particularly important for its gaming and media clients, which in such data heavy industries, often struggle to get the network performance required to ensure end users have a seamless experience.
The project began with an initial lower bandwidth installation and then, a year later, this was upgraded to the current 10Gbps connection. Scalability is extremely important for Safehosts and it not only needs enterprise-grade capacity, but it needs to deliver this reliably. Essentially, the network needs to be as fast and reliable at 10Gbps as it was at 1Gbps, and this is where Neos Networks applied its experience and technical expertise in dealing with large enterprises and critical industries. Indeed, as the data centre continues to grow, it plans to utilise Neos Networks’ ability to scale even further, and DWDM equipment has already been installed on the network; ensuring that Safehosts has future proofed its network to support such a high bandwidth, high power data centre, long into the future.
In addition to the network capabilities, the installation was also extremely important. The project was successfully completed on time and to the specification demanded, thanks to Neos Networks’ ability to provide visibility and flexibility throughout the negotiation and delivery phases.
“Thanks to Neos Networks’ high-capacity, ultra-resilient network, we can uniquely offer technical excellence to our customers 100km out of London. It is the reliable service that we value so much from Neos Networks. We can be confident that our customers receive the same, quality connectivity service today, as they did yesterday and as they will tomorrow. As we like to say, with us and Neos Networks, you can get to London and back in the blink of an eye – or sub four milliseconds!”
Dave Cartwright,Sales Director, Safehosts
About Safehosts
Safehosts owns and operates a carrier neutral, low PuE data centre in Cheltenham, Gloucester. It provides hosting and co-location services to end users in the South West, and has a national base of channel partners who require rack space outside of London. The offering is tailored towards users requiring high bandwidth and high power density.
In addition to the core co-location business, Safehosts uses its national network to provide a range of managed services, dedicated internet access, leased lines, IP transit, and DDoS scrubbing and mitigation services.
