Node4 upgrades second data centre

Launched in February this year, the service was initially accessed via the company’s Northampton data centre (serving the UK Central region), but increased demand from northern businesses prompted Node4 to upgrade its Leeds data centre (serving the UK North region) and deliver the service in closer proximity to customers. The upgrade will also provide additional UK-wide capacity and regional diversity to Node4’s infrastructure. 

The origins of this increased customer demand are highlighted in Node4’s recently released Future of Hybrid Cloud report. Carried out amongst businesses using AWS, Azure and GCP, the survey found that over 50% of companies would adopt hybrid cloud to support applications that didn’t traditionally suit public cloud infrastructure — often due to precise performance or data sovereignty needs. However, more than a third of respondents across the region were deterred from doing so by the complexity of integrating multiple platforms themselves. 

These findings underscore the complexity, compliance, latency, and legacy technology challenges businesses face when migrating to a hybrid IT environment. They also demonstrate the need for an offering, such as Node4’s Managed Azure Hybrid Cloud solution, that can simplify hybrid cloud adoption.

Node4’s Managed Azure Hybrid Cloud solution brings Microsoft Azure technologies into the data centre. The service allows customers to scale on demand without the long lead times often associated with hybrid infrastructure expansion. It also introduces modern Azure tooling across the entire hybrid environment, including site recovery, backup and update management. Furthermore, because it’s a managed service, Node4 handles all the Azure infrastructure setup and configuration — and maintains the hardware in its data centres. Customers select the servers, support package, architecture, and stack environment that are right for them. 

“We’re delighted to extend our Managed Azure Hybrid Cloud solution to our Leeds site and provide a new hybrid region for the UK based in Yorkshire. The expansion continues our steadfast commitment to significant and sustained data centre investment,” comments Andrew Slater, Technology Practice Director - Cloud, at Node4.

He continues: “As demonstrated in our research, businesses are increasingly in need of a simple, effective, and reliable way to migrate more of their legacy infrastructure into an Azure environment without the challenges that often frustrate their digital transformation process.”

A Managed Azure Hybrid Cloud with general purpose nodes starts at £5,000 per month. This includes a three-node Azure Stack HCI cluster (n+1) with an ExpressRoute Circuit and Azure Landing Zone support — the cluster is built using the latest compute and storage technologies, optimised for performance.