Busy day in the UK’s data centre and connectivity spaces as three British players unveil partnerships and expansion of its services in London, Wales and across Europe.

British network, voice and data centre services provider Colt Technologies has announced that the European Central Bank (ECB) has selected the company for the ECB’s connection to TARGET2-Securities (T2S), the new centralised European platform for the settlement of domestic and cross-border securities transactions.

Working in partnership with SIA, Colt aims to migrate the ECB’s T2S platform to its value-added network infrastructure by June 2016.

SIA is also a UK based company that works around the design, creation and management of technology infrastructures and services for financial institutions, central banks, corporates and public administration bodies, in the areas of payments, e-money, network services and capital markets.

The two companies will also provide the ECB with a message processing solution based on INTERCOPE’s BOX Messaging Hub, facilitating the integration of ECB’s application software to the TARGET2-Securities central platform.

Several entities, including CSDs, CCPs and the Eurosystem central banks, are working with the T2S platform.

SIA and Colt’s network infrastructure has been designed to enable security and confidentiality in the transmission of data, along with the highest standards of reliability, performance and service continuity.

T2S is a project implemented by the Eurosystem – the ECB and the central banks of the euro area – and developed and operated by four central banks (Banca d’Italia, Deutsche Bundesbank, Banque de France and Banco de Espana).

It creates a single pan-European securities settlement engine and contributes to the EU’s ambitions of creating a true Single Market in Europe.

John Loveland, VP of Capital Markets at Colt, said: "After the success of the first T2S migration phase, with a large proportion of the data traffic being carried by SIA and Colt, we are very pleased to be working on this project with the European Central Bank. Colt and SIA will provide the ECB with a fully managed, high-performance, highly scalable T2S connectivity and messaging solution."

In other news, London based collocator Netwise Hosting has unveiled it will officially launch its second data centre in the capital by February 25.

The firm said in a statement that although the site has been servicing its existing customer base since May 2015, the company elected to delay the public launch until the facility had settled with its existing clientele, and all supplementary amenity works were complete.

The 11,000 sq ft hub has a PUE of 1.12 which the company credits on the use of an evaporative cooling system. As for power, it boosts up to 64 Amps of fully conditioned power to each rack.

The company first built its own site in March 2014, in Sutton. The data centre has 1,000 sq ft of commercially available data centre floor space, a PUE of 1.15 and up to 32 Amps of fully conditioned power to each rack.

MD Matthew Butt said: "We were fortunate enough to be able to soft-open this facility in May at around 10% capacity before we even began marketing it properly, which is a position most new data centres do not find themselves in.

"This meant that we could really take our time on the finishing touches, without the need to rush into a launch plan driven solely by the need to increase revenue."

Adding to this, colo and IT services provider South West Communications Group (SWComms) has completed investment in a 10Gbps direct connection from its Devon based hub to Europe’s largest data centre in Wales.

The Next Generation Data data centre, who is also on the top ten largest data centres in the world, has 750,000 sq ft of commercial space, built in 1998, has its own private connection to the National SuperGrid delivering 90MW of power generated from 100% renewable sources ad contains 19,000 servers.

For the Exeter-based firm, the investment means SWComms has created a multi data centre infrastructure linking its own purpose-built data centre with the giant facility in Newport.

SWComms’s data centre was opened in 2001 and sits in Exeter and contains 120 cabinets, with the capacity to quadruple this amount as demand continues to grow.

John Holdstock, swcomms’ ICT director, said: "The new 10Gbps link allows for very low latency connections for our customers and access to many of the world’s tier-1 service providers."