Data Centre Server Hosting Services

Provision of server hosting services in a secure, resilient and controlled Data Centre environment. The Data Centre has a number of Data rooms, connected to each other with resilient fibre. The Data rooms are designed and maintained as environmentally controlled areas with climate and access control.

 

CITS will:

  • Provide physical access to systems only to those with an agreed need. Service owners will be provided with temporary access as necessary.
  • Provide physical intrusion detection systems in the data room, connected to the central security system, which will be activated outside normal work hours.
  • Provide continuous staff availability during normal business hours in the Data Room.
  • Ensure there is CCTV provision at the access points to the data room, connected to the main security system.
  • Provide smoke detection in the Data Rooms, although there will be no automatic fire suppression systems.
  • Provide a UPS power connection where provision is available to systems which need controlled shutdown or continuous working across power outages. Where central UPS is unavailable hosted system owners may wish to consider their own rack-mount UPS Provide adequate cooling and humidity control to support racks consuming up to 4KW of power.
  • Provide humidity and temperature monitoring to proactively identify environmental changes that may disrupt services.
  • Agree a service schedule, access needs, backup requirements, recovery priority and any costs with the customer in advance of hosting a server.
  • Reserve the right to decline to host a server or to ask for an existing server to be removed.

 

Additional services by arrangement:

  • Provide specialist cooling to racks consuming up to 20KW of power for a maximum of 30 racks.
  • Provide hosting in multiple data rooms when high availability is required.
  • Monitor servers hosted to identify and proactively resolve any potential disruptions to the service.
  • Carry out regular and/or one-off operational tasks as required.
  • Provide backup and archiving services for the data as required, including daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups and long-term retention of the data as agreed. This is a chargeable service.

 

Virtual Server Hosting:

  • Provide hosting of virtual servers on its virtual server platform
  • Install the operating system (approved Windows) on the virtual servers
  • Monitor the virtual servers (processor, memory and disk usage)
  • Provide automatic resilience for the virtual server platform
  • Provide automatic OS security patches
  • Provide OS backup and recovery if required

 

Customers will:

  • Ensure that servers and other related hardware to be hosted are rack mountable (max. 42U) or the housing is approved by CITS
  • Provide at least one month's notice for the new servers to be hosted
  • Provide at least one month's notice for major changes to space or environmental requirements of existing hosted services
  • Provide information on power needs, network needs, maintenance, archiving (backup) and monitoring requirements of the services
  • Agree a priority for the recovery of the server based on the criticality of the service
  • Inform CITS about any major changes to hosted equipment, such as decommissioning or adding servers, and changing the location of servers
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