Case Study: Christian Aid

Christian Aid

We are a partnership of people, churches and local organisations committed to ending poverty worldwide. For more than 70 years, we’ve provided practical support to our global neighbours in need, and tackled the injustices that keep people poor.

The Business Challenge

Simon Granger, Infrastructure and Operations Manager at Christian Aid said: “we were looking for a secondary data centre outside of the M25 for rack hosting and colocation. Our requirement was for ⅓ rack space, with location, cost and resilience being our top priorities. Christian Aid have a data centre on site but didn’t have a secondary data centre outside of London, so we were looking for a low cost, reliable rack space outside of the M25 to provide us with resiliency for the company. Cost was very important to us being a charity, along with performance, good connectivity and basically a friendly team to work with who could support us through this journey. The main pain points we expected were network design and networking, just basically how we were going to connect to the data centre. Also reliability, making sure it’s always on.” The full audio interview with Simon Granger is available here.

Datanet’s Solution

Simon goes on to say: during the set-up process we had a workshop with the Datanet Team. They designed the connectivity to be robust. We sat down with the engineers at Datanet and planned it all out, tested it and did a fail over test before it went live. Location is very important to us being outside the M25, rack size; we only needed ⅓ of a rack and Datanet were one of the few data centres who offered this at a good price.” Datanet offer ⅓ racks with a large 14U available, a nice little bit of extra space over a ¼ rack. This rack comes with high power and high bandwidth allocation and Datanet’s industry recognised very high levels of support, reliability and flexibility.

Redesigning Christian Aid’s set up: Christian Aid found our engineers to be extremely helpful in re-designing their network to join their rack space in flexible accommodating data centre.

“Reliability, uptime and good support to help with network design and migration for this leading UK charity.”

Simon Granger, Infrastructure & Operations Manager, Christian Aid