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Remote Hands Services in Ireland

By Reboot Monkey Team

24/7 on-site datacenter support across Dublin and Cork. Vendor-neutral coverage inside Equinix DB1-DB4, Interxion DUB1-DUB2, CyrusOne, and Colt. EU entity, GDPR-ready operations.

Remote Hands Services in Ireland

What Remote Hands Services Cover

Remote hands is on-site physical support carried out by a trained technician inside a colocation datacenter. The engineer acts as your physical presence when your team is not in the building. Every task is performed under your instruction, remotely authorised via ticket or phone, then executed and documented with photographic evidence. Remote hands tasks in an Irish datacentre typically fall into four categories: hardware intervention, cabling and patching, power management, and observation and reporting. Hardware intervention covers the physical work your equipment needs but your team cannot perform from a desk. This means server reboots, hard power cycles when a BIOS hang leaves a machine unresponsive, drive swaps under warranty replacement procedures, KVM connections for out-of-band console access, and physical relocation of equipment within a cage or cabinet. In Irish datacentres running dense compute workloads for US hyperscaler satellite operations, a stuck server at 3am Dublin time can cascade into a service outage affecting customers in multiple time zones. A remote hands technician resolves that within the agreed response window. Cabling and patching is the most frequent category. Engineers manage structured cabling, label runs, patch cross-connects between cabinets, and trace and document existing cable plant that may have accumulated over years of incremental deployments. INEX (Internet Neutral Exchange Association CLG), Ireland's national internet exchange, operates peering infrastructure inside Dublin facilities. Clients connecting to INEX often require cross-connect patching or cable management as their peering footprint grows. Power management tasks include PDU outlet cycling for equipment that has locked up and cannot be reached via IPMI, verifying breaker states after a power event, and confirming dual-feed connectivity after a facility maintenance window. Irish datacentres operate on 230V/50Hz European standard power infrastructure. Observation and reporting tasks cover visual inspections of equipment health indicators, LED status checks, temperature reads from equipment panels, and photographed audits of a cage or cabinet delivered as a structured report. These are common requests from US-headquartered companies managing their Irish DC footprints remotely from a different time zone.
  • Server reboots and hard power cycles for unresponsive equipment
  • KVM and out-of-band console connections
  • Drive swaps and hardware replacement under your RMA procedure
  • Cable patching, labelling, and cross-connect management
  • PDU outlet cycling and power path verification
  • Visual inspections and photographic equipment audits
  • INEX cross-connect support and peering infrastructure patching
  • Equipment relocation within cage or cabinet

Dublin and Cork Datacenter Coverage

Dublin accounts for approximately 90% of Ireland's total colocation capacity and is the location where the majority of remote hands work is requested. Reboot Monkey operates across all major Dublin facilities as a vendor-neutral provider, meaning the same team and the same SLA applies regardless of which building your equipment sits in. The primary Dublin facility clusters are: Profile Park and Ballycoolin (Dublin 11 and Dublin 15): This north Dublin industrial corridor is home to Equinix DB1, DB2, DB3, and DB4. These four facilities form the largest carrier-neutral exchange campus in Ireland. Equinix DB1-DB4 house the Irish presence of a significant share of the 1,000-plus US technology companies that have chosen Ireland as their European base. Clients at these facilities often require remote hands support that crosses facility boundaries, for example tracing a cross-connect from a cage in DB3 to a meet-me room in DB1. Citywest Business Campus (Dublin 24): Interxion, now operating as part of Digital Realty, runs DUB1 and DUB2 at Citywest. These facilities serve a distinct tenant community from the Equinix campus. Following changes to Digital Realty's third-party engineer access policy, a growing number of DUB1 and DUB2 tenants now engage Reboot Monkey for routine remote hands tasks that were previously handled by in-house Digital Realty technicians. Clonshaugh Business and Technology Park (Dublin 17): This north Dublin campus hosts colocation space used by Colt and by Google's Irish infrastructure. Tenants here often require remote hands support for network equipment and cabling work. Grange Castle, South Dublin: A secondary suburban campus used for enterprise and hyperscaler infrastructure. Cork is approximately 220km south of Dublin and represents Ireland's secondary datacenter market. Apple's campus operations in the Cork area have driven demand for on-site support in this region. Reboot Monkey provides remote hands coverage in Cork for clients who need consistent SLA coverage across their entire Irish footprint without managing two separate vendor relationships.
  • Equinix DB1, DB2, DB3, DB4 in north Dublin (Profile Park, Ballycoolin)
  • Interxion/Digital Realty DUB1 and DUB2 at Citywest
  • Colt and Google-adjacent facilities at Clonshaugh
  • Grange Castle enterprise campus, south Dublin
  • Cork city area coverage, approximately 220km south of Dublin
  • Single vendor relationship covering all Irish facilities under one SLA

How Remote Hands Delivery Works: Process and SLA

Reboot Monkey operates a 24/7 network operations centre (NOC) that handles remote hands requests across all Irish facilities. Response times and escalation paths are defined before any work begins, so clients know exactly what to expect when they open a ticket at 2am. The standard process for a remote hands request works as follows. A client opens a ticket via the support portal or calls the NOC directly. The NOC engineer confirms facility access credentials, validates the scope of work against the ticket, and dispatches the on-site technician. For standard requests, the first on-site response is within four hours of ticket confirmation. For emergency requests, the response target is faster and agreed on a per-client basis during onboarding. On arrival at the facility, the technician signs in through the datacenter's own access control procedures. All work is performed under the client's live instruction or against a documented task list provided in the ticket. Photographic evidence is captured for every physical action: before, during, and after. The completed ticket is closed with a full activity log and image attachments, giving the client an auditable record of exactly what was done and when. Clients who manage equipment across multiple Dublin facilities under one contract receive a single ticket queue and a single point of escalation. This matters for network operations teams who may have infrastructure spread across an Equinix DB campus and a Digital Realty DUB building simultaneously. Engineers working in Irish datacentres carry vendor-neutral certifications relevant to the hardware and cabling standards common in this market. Reboot Monkey does not hold any commercial relationship with Equinix, Interxion, Digital Realty, CyrusOne, or Colt that would create a conflict of interest when working inside their facilities. The client's instruction is the only instruction that matters.
  • 24/7 NOC with continuous coverage, no business-hours restrictions
  • 4-hour SLA for standard on-site response across Dublin facilities
  • Photographic evidence captured for every physical action
  • Full activity log returned with every closed ticket
  • Single ticket queue for clients with multi-facility Irish footprints
  • Vendor-neutral certifications held by on-site engineers
  • No commercial conflict with any Irish facility operator

GDPR, DPC Compliance, and DORA for Financial Services

Ireland's position as the European headquarters location for Google, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft is directly tied to the role of the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). The DPC is the EU lead supervisory authority for all of these companies under Article 56 of the General Data Protection Regulation, meaning that GDPR enforcement decisions affecting these companies' EU operations originate in Dublin. This concentration of regulated data infrastructure creates specific compliance requirements for anyone handling physical access to equipment inside Irish datacentres. A remote hands technician who enters a cage housing production infrastructure for a company subject to DPC oversight is operating in a regulated environment. The physical access log, the ticket record, and the photographic evidence are all part of the compliance paper trail. Reboot Monkey is an EU-registered entity. All remote hands engagements in Ireland are covered by EU data protection law, and the operational records produced during each job are processed and stored under GDPR-compliant procedures. Clients operating under Irish or EU regulatory frameworks can engage Reboot Monkey without the vendor gap that arises when using a non-EU provider for physical datacenter access. For financial services clients, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA, EU 2022/2554) entered application in January 2025. DORA requires in-scope firms to maintain documented evidence of operational resilience for their ICT infrastructure, including physical infrastructure maintained by third-party service providers. A remote hands provider whose work is fully logged, ticketed, and auditable satisfies the third-party documentation requirements that DORA imposes on firms' ICT risk management frameworks. Reboot Monkey's ticketing and photographic evidence process was designed with exactly this audit trail requirement in mind. For clients building or maintaining infrastructure subject to Irish financial regulation, the combination of EU entity status, full operational logging, and GDPR-compliant data handling removes a significant compliance exposure that arises when using providers outside the EU regulatory perimeter.
  • Ireland DPC is EU lead supervisory authority for Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft
  • Reboot Monkey is an EU-registered entity operating under GDPR
  • Every ticket generates an auditable physical access record
  • DORA (EU 2022/2554) in application since January 2025 for financial services
  • Photographic evidence and activity logs satisfy DORA third-party documentation requirements
  • No regulatory gap: EU entity handling physical access inside EU-regulated infrastructure

Vendor-Neutral Support vs. Facility-Captive Smart Hands

Every major Irish datacentre operator offers its own branded on-site support service. Equinix calls it SmartHands. Interxion and Digital Realty offer equivalent services under their own labels. These services are competent inside their own facilities, but they have a structural limitation: they only work inside buildings that facility operator controls. A company with equipment in both Equinix DB3 and Interxion DUB1 cannot use Equinix SmartHands for the DUB1 cage. They cannot use the Interxion service for DB3. They end up with two separate vendor relationships, two separate ticket systems, two separate billing relationships, and two separate escalation paths. When a cross-facility task arises, such as tracing a circuit from one building to another, neither facility's in-house team can follow it across the boundary. Reboot Monkey is independent of every facility operator in Ireland. The same team, the same SLA, and the same ticket system covers Equinix DB1-DB4, Interxion DUB1-DUB2, CyrusOne, and Colt under a single contract. This matters because the Irish datacenter market is not a single-operator market. Dublin's carrier-neutral exchange ecosystem means that network-connected companies frequently have footprint in multiple buildings, often in different operators' campuses. There is also a pricing dynamic worth understanding. Facility-captive smart hands is billed at the facility operator's rate card, which carries the margin of the building owner. A third-party provider like Reboot Monkey does not have that overhead structure, and pricing reflects the work performed rather than a facility premium. For companies managing a distributed Irish infrastructure footprint, the consolidation of all remote hands work under one independent vendor is a procurement and operational simplification. One contract, one invoice, one escalation path, regardless of which building needs attention.
  • Independent of Equinix, Interxion, Digital Realty, CyrusOne, and Colt
  • Single contract covers all Irish facilities, no matter the operator
  • No facility premium on rate card: pricing based on work performed
  • Cross-facility tasks handled by one team under one ticket
  • No commercial incentive to favour one facility operator over another
  • Consistent SLA whether the job is in DB3, DUB1, or a Cork facility

Who Uses Remote Hands Services in Ireland

Ireland's datacenter market is shaped by the concentration of US technology companies that have established their European operations in Dublin. This creates a specific demand pattern for remote hands services that differs from other EU markets. US-headquartered technology companies with Dublin infrastructure are the most frequent users. When a company's European infrastructure is managed from a US operations centre, the time zone gap between the US team and the Dublin facility makes on-site support a daily operational reality rather than an occasional emergency. Remote hands is how these teams extend their reach into a building that is 8 to 11 hours ahead of their working day. Network operators and ISPs with peering presence at INEX use remote hands for cross-connect patching and circuit provisioning. INEX operates at multiple locations across Dublin, and as members grow their peering footprint they need physical support for the cabling and patching work that peering expansions require. Financial services firms regulated under DORA need audit-ready documentation for every third-party interaction with their ICT infrastructure. The combination of full ticket logging, photographic evidence, and EU entity status makes Reboot Monkey a compliant choice for regulated financial services clients managing infrastructure in Dublin datacentres. Managed service providers and IT outsourcers who have taken on client infrastructure in Irish facilities use remote hands to extend their own service delivery without hiring local headcount. A London-based MSP with a client whose servers sit in Equinix DB2 cannot afford to send an engineer to Dublin for a drive swap. Remote hands is the operationally efficient solution. Enterprise IT teams at Irish companies undergoing datacenter consolidation or migration projects use remote hands for the physical execution work: decommissioning old kit, racking new equipment, labelling and documenting cable plant, and verifying configurations. These project-based engagements often require coordination across multiple facilities over a defined project timeline. If you are planning a migration or consolidation, see our related services for server migration and data centre migration support in Ireland. Startups and scale-ups growing into colocation for the first time also use remote hands as a cost-effective alternative to building their own on-site presence. When a company first moves equipment from a managed host into bare-metal colocation in an Equinix DB facility, remote hands fills the operational gap until the team has built the internal capability to manage physical infrastructure directly.
  • US-headquartered companies managing Dublin infrastructure across time zones
  • Network operators and ISPs with INEX peering presence in Dublin
  • Financial services firms with DORA ICT documentation requirements
  • Managed service providers serving Irish enterprise clients
  • Enterprise IT teams running datacenter migration and consolidation projects
  • Scale-ups and startups moving into bare-metal colocation for the first time

Remote Hands Services in Ireland: Frequently Asked Questions

Which datacentres in Dublin does Reboot Monkey cover for remote hands?

Reboot Monkey provides remote hands coverage across all major Dublin datacentres, including Equinix DB1, DB2, DB3, and DB4 in the north Dublin campus area, Interxion/Digital Realty DUB1 and DUB2 at Citywest, Colt facilities at Clonshaugh, and CyrusOne. Coverage operates under a single SLA regardless of the facility.

What is the response time SLA for remote hands requests in Ireland?

Standard remote hands requests in Ireland carry a 4-hour on-site response SLA, available 24/7 including weekends and public holidays. Emergency response targets are agreed during client onboarding for teams that require faster escalation windows.

Is Reboot Monkey independent of Equinix SmartHands and other facility-owned services?

Yes. Reboot Monkey has no commercial relationship with Equinix, Interxion, Digital Realty, CyrusOne, or Colt. This means the same team and the same SLA covers all Irish facilities under one contract, without the restriction of facility-captive services that only operate inside a single operator's buildings.

Can Reboot Monkey provide remote hands services in Cork as well as Dublin?

Yes. Reboot Monkey covers Cork, approximately 220km south of Dublin, for clients who need consistent SLA coverage across their full Irish datacentre footprint. Cork coverage is included under the same contract and ticket system as Dublin.

How does Reboot Monkey handle GDPR compliance for physical datacenter access in Ireland?

Reboot Monkey is an EU-registered entity. All physical access records, ticket documentation, and photographic evidence produced during remote hands work in Ireland are processed under GDPR-compliant procedures. This is particularly relevant for clients whose infrastructure in Irish datacentres is subject to oversight by the Irish Data Protection Commission, which acts as EU lead supervisory authority for many major technology companies.

Does Reboot Monkey provide documentation suitable for DORA compliance?

Yes. Every remote hands engagement produces a full activity log and photographic record that can be retained as part of a firm's ICT third-party documentation under the Digital Operational Resilience Act (EU 2022/2554), which entered application in January 2025. Financial services clients with infrastructure in Dublin datacentres can use this documentation to satisfy DORA's requirements for evidence of third-party ICT service delivery.

What types of physical tasks are covered under remote hands in an Irish datacenter?

Remote hands covers server reboots and hard power cycles, KVM and console connections, drive swaps and hardware replacement under your RMA procedure, cable patching and cross-connect management, PDU outlet cycling, visual equipment inspections, and photographic audits. For more complex work involving configuration and diagnostics, see our smart hands services in Ireland.

How do I request remote hands support for my Dublin or Cork datacentre?

Open a ticket through the Reboot Monkey support portal or contact the NOC directly by phone. For new clients, reach out via the contact page to discuss your Irish datacentre footprint, SLA requirements, and any multi-facility coverage needs before committing to a contract.

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