San Francisco-headquartered data centre giant Digital Realty has opened its twelfth London data centre, following a £208 million investment in its Crawley campus.
The 12MW Crawley North site, which opened today, features four data halls comprising a total 55,000 square feet. Hall one is already under contract, the company said.
The investment is the latest in a robust UK data centre market.
Last month, as Computer Business Review reported, rival CyrusOne said it is bringing an estimated additional 45MW to the London market in coming years as demand for data centre capacity shows no sign of abating.
Digital Realty’s MD, EMEA Rob Coupland told Computer Business Review: “This brings our total investment in the UK to £1.8 billion; it’s our largest market in Europe and we see it growing strongly. There’s ongoing significant demand and we expect to sign investment in 2019 as well.”
He added: “Our Crawley campus was established a few years ago: it’s a good location with good proximity to networks and good availability of power. There’s enough land to make it a true campus and and it has strong interconnections to our networking-dense and cloud-onramp-dense sites in London.”
With data production growing, demand for sites to store it is set to soar.
The amount of global data produced is estimated to swell from 23 to 175 Zettabytes by 2025, a new white paper from IDC, sponsored by Seagate, is set to reveal next week, with almost half (49 percent) of the world’s stored data to reside in the public cloud.
Research house 451 earlier this year added, in a report sponsored by Digital Realty: “We can expect to see steady growth [this year] in essential IT services such as security, storage and backup, with an increased emphasis on big-data solutions, hybrid cloud delivery models, private cloud, and continued investment in proven services such as colocation and public cloud.”
