VIRTUS has flipped the switch and turned on London’s largest Data Centre Campus in Stockley Park, just north of Heathrow in west London.
VIRTUS, which is backed by ST Telemedia, has named its two new data centres London5 and London6; they have the capability to deliver up to 40MW of computational power between them.
The new campus in Stockley Park comprises over 70,000m2 of data centre space. It has the ability to draw 120MVA from an array of grid connection points.
VIRTUS told Computer Business Review that it is currently fitting out for four customers, but could not name names.
Location Choice
The company said the site is highly secure, with six layers of physical security, including 24/7 on site security. It is capable of being subdivided allowing clients to have anything from a rack in a shared space, to their own suite or data hall with dedicated power and innovative cooling, also offering office space for customer use.
Competition Includes…
VIRTUS Data Centres competes with a number of providers in the London market – wholesale and retail (mostly where retail providers are trying to win large cloud deals).
“When it comes to wholesale-only deals, it competes against the likes of Colt Data Centres, NTT Gyron, Digital Realty and ARK Data Centres, which all operate on the outskirts of London city. It will also compete with relative newcomer Zenium, which now offers datacenter space in Slough and Stockley Park in the UK”, said 451 Research’s Penny Jones.
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Neil Cresswell, CEO of VIRTUS Data Centres, said in a released statement that: “With the hunger for connectivity and data growing exponentially, our data centres continue to play a vital role in enabling the UK and Europe’s digital economy.”
VIRTUS have designed the campus with the inclusion of public, private and hybrid clouds in mind. User can use its “cloud connect” which allows companies to connect their cloud directly to the data centre via a fibre duct infrastructure.
In their announcement VIRTUS said that the system is “design certified to Uptime Institute Tier III standard and will help customers future proof their expansion options for flexible colocation on a site that has the scale to deliver longer term capacity.”
The data centre campus has been placed at Stockley Park due to its location at a point where UK telecoms carries have established fibre loops and low latency infrastructure.
The campus is 16 miles away from central London and only seven miles away from Slough, meaning proximity to the main high speed fibre optical connection between London and Slough.
Mr Cresswell commented that: “We continue to see a burgeoning demand for colocation in the UK data centre market, as enterprises and cloud providers scale out their platforms to meet user demand for digital services.”
“Importantly, we also have a power and space road-map in London of over 100MW that can continue to support customers as their needs change and their businesses grow,” he added.
