A day in the life – Stuart Paul, director of data centre operations, iomart

Wednesday 10th October 2007

• 6.45am – 8.00am

The day starts well for Stuart as he catches the 6.50am First Capital Connect train from Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire into London Moorgate. The rain has stayed away, and his night’s sleep wasn’t disturbed by any tales of woe from his network operations teams relaying stories of network or power failure. He could spend this 45-minute train journey catching up on the increase in inheritance tax thresholds and who would partner Michael Owen up front against Estonia, but with major commissioning testing underway at iomart’s London data centre, this is a good opportunity to review data and reports on the progress of the previous days’ tests and work. Once the train arrives at Moorgate, it is only a five-minute walk to the data centre office; the ‘office’ for today, in Stuart’s case, being the new 16,000 square foot data centre in the heart of London’s Square Mile.

This City of London data centre is the flagship in a group of four, the others, in Glasgow, Leicester and Nottingham, were purchased by the iomart group earlier this year, giving it a UK-wide network of data centres from which to provide services to customers throughout the country.

After several months of frenetic activity, the centre is a few days away from being fully operational and ready for the installation of its first customers. Of the four data centres, the Glasgow centre is already servicing clients and the other two will be brought on stream in the early part of 2008. Stuart usually spends one day per week at each site – either with landlords, customers, planners or his management team – which means a lot of travelling up and down the country to make sure the respective data centres are functioning well, or on schedule for launch.

On entering the office, Stuart grabs himself a quick coffee, receives a quick status report from the night network operations centre team as they prepare to hand over to the day team, and settles down to his email.

• 8.00am – 10.00am

Typically Stuart’s email will bring an assortment of service alerts, reports and landlord issues.

Stuart’s role is an extremely busy one just now, especially where London is concerned with the imminent launch of the City facility. With so much engineering activity and testing underway, Stuart has today received several emails concerning variations to the commissioning project. These need to be discussed with the onsite management team and a review of all of the proposed variations need to be carefully considered. The cost of these works is always a major consideration for Stuart. He needs to make sure that the project budget is closely monitored, while ensuring ‘best practice’ process and procedure is followed – delivering the data centre into operation on budget and on time is a constant challenge.

• 10.00am - 12.00pm

After catching up on his emails, Stuart chairs the weekly change management review meeting with the data centre’s managers. At this meeting all changes are assessed for impact and risk assessment. The maintenance schedule, a crucial part of ensuring the data centre’s operational efficiency, is debated and agreed upon.

This week, with an existing major customer undergoing a virtualisation project on its existing server estate, a lengthy discussion takes place on a conference call with the Glasgow NOC lead. This concerns risk assessments and method statements and a back-out plan in the event that a problem occurs during the project. Once Stuart is satisfied that his team of departmental heads agree and sign off on the process is obtained, he approves and authorises the change event. The iomart change process is conducted according to Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) governance, and before any changes are authorised a review is made to ensure all necessary compliance is in place.

• 12.00pm – 12.30pm

Stuart has half an hour before heading out for a lunch meeting, and so spends some time catching up on emails from the morning.

• 12.30pm – 1.15pm

For lunch, Stuart heads to Bishopsgate and grabs a sandwich and a coffee with an old colleague who is now IT manager for a large investment bank. It’s a good chance to catch up and also to discuss iomart’s plans for its data centre business.

Although this is a short meeting, Stuart regularly meets with IT directors as well as chief technology officers of major organisations in the City. Today’s discussion centres on the data centre space shortage at the investment bank at which Stuart’s former colleague works. The bank had identified this potential problem more than twelve months ago and carried out a data centre strategy review. Although this included a major virtualisation exercise there is still a need for expansion and iomart can satisfy this requirement. Another meeting has been arranged with the potential customer and Stuart will discuss this new business opportunity with his colleagues at iomart to ensure preparations can be made to offer the best possible service.

• 1.30pm – 2.00pm

Iomart group is listed on the Alternative Investment Market, and Stuart has a call with one of the group’s investors who wants to find out more about the progress of the data centre operations within iomart. Stuart outlines the opportunities which iomart sees in this market, and the confidence the group has in its potential for growth over the next two years.

Stuart will be presenting to one of iomart’s largest investors in late October to update them on the status and readiness of its data centre operations. With a shortage of premium data centre space within the UK generally (especially so in south east England), iomart finds itself in the enviable position of having a mission-critical data centre within the City of London.

This places the company in a strong position to meet and satisfy the growing need for tier 3 data centre space in the south east specifically, as well as the UK-wide offering in the rest of its data centre network.

• 2.00pm - 3.00pm

On-site meeting with potential client Rob Feeney of Arbinet, a NASDAQ-listed, US-based online trading platform provider whose customers include iTunes. Stuart takes Mr Feeney on a tour of the data centre and discusses with him Arbinet’s likely requirements and how iomart can meet the company’s needs.

Stuart meets with as many potential customers as his diary permits. His operational team will provide ongoing critical operational support to the customer. He strongly believes that customer relationships should be established at the earliest opportunity in the sales cycle and any time that he can spend with customers to ensure a strong and enduring relationship can only benefit the client and, ultimately, iomart’s business.

• 3.00pm - 4.30pm

A sales team meeting is held to discuss each sales prospect and understand likely requirements eg space, power, support etc.

Stuart regularly meets with iomart’s sales team. Data centre providers have only the resilience and reliability of their data centres to sell. This is supported entirely by Stuart’s operational team and he considers close communication with the sales team vital in order for his operational infrastructure team to effectively support the hosting customer base.

• 4.30pm - 5.30pm

Stuart works through his email and returns calls, then plans for a trip to the Nottingham data centre tomorrow. This data centre is built and will be operational early in 2008, and Stuart is keen to increase its power capacity. Tomorrow, meetings will be held with power suppliers to formulate the feasibility study plans and enable a decision to be made on the viability of the capacity increase.

• 6.00pm

On the train home, Stuart reads reports from the Data Centre Steering Group at the BCS. Stuart was a member of the steering group prior to joining iomart, but although he stood down following his appointment he is still asked to offer advice on a range of issues.

Tomorrow’s trip to Nottingham will be another exciting day as iomart’s data centre offering gathers pace, with a palpable buzz throughout the company at the prospect of what lies ahead. Stuart’s breadth of experience in this area will ensure the final service will match iomart’s reputation for reliability, while increasing its capacity to offer firms in the City and throughout the UK a first-class service.

For now, though, he’s looking forward to a few hours of relaxation at home.

About Stuart: Stuart joined the iomart group in his current role in the summer of 2007. Stuart has more than ten years of experience in designing, constructing and operating mission critical data centres.

He spent a large part of his career with Cable & Wireless where he was responsible for data centres within the EMEA region. Stuart’s strategic vision for the future of data centres has also been utilised by several FTSE 100 organisations in a consultancy capacity.

His experience has been recognised by the industry, and Stuart currently advises the Data Centre Steering Group for the British Computing Society on future data centre design, and has latterly been involved with the debate on the impact of data centres on the environment.