// UK Grid Newsletter - May 2009

/ Synergy House Electricity Price Freeze

Today UK Grid announces that they have signed a 3 year fixed price energy deal with EDF and would like to pass on this financial security by offering fixed priced colocation for anything up to 3 years, on new contracts both for new and existing customers. If your contract has expired and you would like to renew your contract, please speak to Robert Smith on 0845 260 4743 for further details.

UK Grid has started the pilot of a new Internet Exchange for BGP capable customers in Synergy House. An Internet Exchange allows BGP customers to exchange routes or prefixes with each other over a common switch platform, this then negates the need to use transit bandwidth to route between customers in Synergy House. This service is a free service provided by UK Grid with free cabling to the IXP switch in Synergy House. If the pilot is a success, more features will be added to the IXP and the plan is to expand it out to other Manchester facilities. If you would like further information please check http://ix.ukgrid.net for further information.

PUE is a metric to measure the energy efficiency of a data centre and was developed by the Green Grid. The PUE of a data centre is calculated by dividing the total power usage of a facility by the power usage of the IT equipment (servers, storage and network equipment as well as switches, monitors and workstations to control the data centre) within the facility. The average data centre PUE is 2.0 however some less efficient data centres have a PUE of anything up to 3.0.

UK Grid has attained a PUE of < 1.4 by using Cold Aisle Containment on all rack aisles in Synergy House, Blanking Plate technologies, Inverter driven Airedale cooling systems and a near unity Chloride UPS system meaning minimal power is lost in conversion.

UK Grid's data centre carbon offsetting is achieved by following the Carbon Passport's guidelines and their government approved method of carbon footprint reduction. Carbon Passport offset UK Grid's carbon footprint by buying credits called Certified Emission Reductions (CERs). CERs are only issued to projects approved under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Treaty. These projects are subjected to rigorous qualification procedures and ongoing monitoring. CERs are only awarded to projects that would not have taken place without the revenue from CERs. CERs help to fund projects in the developing world and help reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Examples include wind farms, energy efficiency projects and electricity generation from landfill gas. The UNFCC website provides details of all registered projects.

1. Free A plus B on all 48RU cabinets OR no setup fee

2. Free GigE VLAN to any Manchester on-net locations

3. No setup fee on all ¼ cabinet sales

4. Flexible and short term contracts available

5. Electricity price guarantee for up to three years

UK Grid has begun installation of a new fibre optic route between Synergy House and Greenheys Data Centre to increase both resilience and capacity. The work will be commencing next week and will follow with a network equipment upgrade also in Greenheys to increase capacity on this busy route. The addition of a new fibre route bolsters our already impressive portfolio of fibre optic paths and gives us huge fibre capacity in Manchester, enabling us to deliver end-to-end dark fibre circuits between Greenheys DC, Synergy House, IFL2, Telecity Williams and Telecity Kilburn.

For further details on any items in this newsletter please contact UK Grid as per below.