My experience at Telehouse
With some upgrade works due in one of our main points of presents at Telehouse, Emma our office administrator tagged long to help understand from an end user prospective what is inside a data centre. Here are Emma’s own words
My first visit to Telehouse was about two years ago when the building and security was different. I have been a few more times since the changes were made. I would like to share my experiences of what it is like visiting Telehouse.
As I am not on their permanent list I have to be accompanied in the building at all times by an approved person. This applies every time I go I have to be added on to the access list. The only time I am allowed in unaccompanied is if an email is sent in giving me permission for the day of the visit in the event of an emergency. This will grant me access for a specific amount of time on that day and only to the part of the data centre I am visiting.
On my first visit, you could enter the area in the same car. I had to read all the health and safety documents, read through the rules and sign some documents. I was made aware of the health and safety policy’s which include things like not wearing sandals or high heels and the fire safety. As there is a lot of electrical equipment in the building they have a dry sprinkler system in case of a fire. If you are in a server room and hear the fire alarm go of you have to get out of the room at once as these sprinklers are filled with FM-200. My photo and my biometrics finger prints were taken and they checked my ID. Back then they had an entrance point that was like a tube and one person had to go through at a time. This was so it could verify you were allowed to enter the main area. Once inside you used a pass card to enter doors throughout the building.
Nowadays only the driver can be in the car, anyone else must walk in and be checked at the gate. I have to be signed in by whoever I am with at the reception. Inside the building, doors must be opened with a pass and some with pass and biometrics.
Before you go into a server room there is a sign outside that tells you that photography / food and drink is not allowed inside. Once inside the server room there is a loud humming noise from all the servers but the longer you are in the room the less you notice it. There are lots of cables running across the ceiling of the room. I was provided ear defenders to help protect my hearing from the noise. Some of the cabinets are kept neat while others are a mess of cables. There are quite a few cabinets in on room which keeps the room warm.
As someone who is there to assist and isn’t technical its daunting to know that all it takes is pulling one cable and you could take out part of the internet. It’s also very interesting learning how the internet routes through these data centres all around the world and each cabinet inside is a provider. Sometimes a connection can get sent around the world just to come back to where it started. Some of the cabinets in the data centres very rarely need someone to do work on them.
I have seen the outside of other data centres and some are smaller than others and security is different for all of them. But all are well kept and very secure.
They keep all the internet running and safe, any outages and the response is quick.
For Safety reasons, Emma was at all times under supervision of our network team. There are some security measures in place which have not been included due to the sensitivity of a datacentre.
