UK - Best connectivity options to Equinix LD6 in Slough from Central London based office?

Hi All,

It's been a while since I used a Data Centre myself and I am just wanting to double check if I am missing anything. This is basically an Intel gathering post.

The firm I now work for have a "currently empty" rack in Equinix LD6 which we need to connect back to our offices in central London and begin populating with network and kit. We currently have BT and Colt as well as G-Networks as network providers in our office, but we would be willing to bring more carriers into the building if their was a performance and or commercial reason to do so.

This rack will contain our backup servers and storage so that we have something to recover our office based devices from if we ever had a worst case DR event in the office. The initial data sync from our office location based PC and Server equipment will be roughly 200 PC's and about 30 servers with a total data size of around 13TB for the initial sync. The Daily Delta will probably be less than about 1 GB.

The network link would be dedicated to just this backup scenario and we don't intend to do many restores back to the existing office. Their might be the odd use case for restores, but if a major disaster like a flood, fire or plague of land sharks with ** Lasers ** mounted on their heads, was to befall our office, we would most likely be restoring our kit to a DR location (Still to be determined). For now just getting the data to survive an event is the primary concern and we will work on how we restore it later.

Can I get away with just bringing in an 100 Mb or 1 Gb internet link at both ends and running a VPN over it for the backups? I imagine the initial sync would be an absolute bitch in this scenario and could this handle the Delta on a daily basis? Backup window would be from 11 PM to 6 AM UK time so only 7 hours to play with.

We are not short on Dosh, but I imagine on the other end of the scale, Dark Fibre is overkill? What is it like getting Dark Fibre installed to a rack in LD6? Any complications we should be aware of?

Besides Colt and BT, are their any other good network providers available in LD6 that I would be better of dealing with? The time suck and admin of chasing BT and Colt around to just get them to install kit in our office was painful.