Students get inspirational data centre tour with CyrusOne
Author: Isha Jain
Engineering students at UTC Heathrow have received a rare opportunity to tour an operational CyrusOne data centre, seeing for themselves the racks of servers used to store computer data (email, website, online transactions and more) for some of the biggest companies in the world, along with the electrical and mechanical equipment needed to support such important infrastructure.
Shortly before school broke for the holidays, seven engineering students visited CyrusOne’s LON1 site based in Slough, where they met Jacob Dowsett, Regional Operations Director, and Steve Hayward, Vice President European Operations. Jacob was especially inspirational, telling the students about his unconventional path into his role, “What we are hoping to do is shed light on this industry and make the route for your generation more straightforward.”
The purpose of the tour was to support the learning these students have been doing on the data services industry as part of their Engineering BTEC course through the Digital Futures Programme. This programme, unique to UTC Heathrow, is designed to open opportunities for students to explore an array of careers within the data services industry, as well as equipping them for other technical careers.
Although the programme has been running since 2021, this is the first time any of the students have visited a fully operational data centre. Having made sure that their clients were happy with the students being shown around, CyrusOne were delighted to offer the inaugural tour.
Jacob also explained how vital it is for students to be able to see the workings of the data centre in person, “It’s so important for the students to be able to visualise these data centres and see for themselves. Obviously, it’s data sensitive, really high security, but without these experiences – showing the students what’s actually inside the data centre and what engineering roles there are – they’re not going to want to join the industry. They need to see things up and running and see themselves doing it.”
On the day, students were shown a short presentation on what happened at the data centre, before starting the ‘electrical tour’.
Much to the students’ delight, this involved the big switch on of a power generator. They were shown how it was worked by an engineer – but it wasn’t a passive watch. Like all good school trips, the students were armed with a clipboard containing questions they were required to answer. This meant they were actively engaged, listening to the engineers and most importantly learning.
The second part of the tour looked at the mechanical side – the cooling system. Data centre servers generate a lot of heat, so all require some kind of cooling mechanism, in this case an adiabatic cooling system.
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