Texas-based CyrusOne is committing to three new London data centres, Computer Business Review can exclusively reveal, bringing an estimated additional 45MW to the London market in coming years as demand for data centre capacity shows no sign of abating.
The NASDAQ-listed global data centre provider yesterday announced publicly the location of its previously revealed CyrusOne London III facility, saying construction was underway on the Slough Trading Estate.
Matt Pullen, MD, Europe, CyrusOne
This facility will offer approximately 39,500 square feet of data centre space with a critical IT load of 9MW.
Each data hall will be customised to client specifications and will including the latest adiabatic cooling technology and low PUE’s, the CyrusOne said.
Speaking to Computer Business Review, Matt Pullen, CyrusOne’s Managing Director, Europe, said: “It’s a race to scale. The cloud has to go somewhere physically. Easier for cloud to go into third party co-location business. It’s hard for them to forecast demand accurately, so it’s easier for them to go into environments in which they can scale.”
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He added: “The market can’t build this stuff quick enough. But cloud won’t commit unless they can see capacity to that kind of scale growth. They don’t want fragmented data centres. They want to put network rows in then scale within a single facility. We’re committing to a further 36MW in London.”
As well as London III, the company is pressing with development sites London IV and London V; both anticipated to scale to 18MW and both in Slough itself, rather than Slough Trading Estate, Pullen revealed.
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CyrusOne London Plans Come Amid Rapid European Expansion
The company added in the public release that it was also expanding its presence in Germany, with its Frankfurt III data centre to include two connected four-story data centers offering a total of approximately 123,786 square feet of space.
CyrusOne’s London II data centre
The facility will provide a critical IT load of 22MW with multiple fibre providers providing carrier neutral connectivity.
CyrusOne currently has development sites in process across London, Dublin, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. When combined with the assets of hyperscale data centre provider Zenium (which it agreed to acquire in December 2017, closing in August 2018) they will result in a total prospective European footprint of nearly 250MW.
Matt Pullen, who joined CyrusOne from Zenium, told Computer Business Review: “The Zenium acquisition was an obvious play. There’s not a lot of human capital in the data centre market. And they weren’t just buying a team but buying assets.
He added: “It’s not just a race to scale, it’s a race to ensure that everything you’re producing is very, very efficient.”
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“If you rent data centre space and put a load of servers in it, you get the bill for the servers, but then the data centre also sends the bill for building power and cooling… We’re using adiabatic cooling, which means we can offer a PUE of 1.2, which doesn’t change a lot even when at low loads. PUE at low loads can be very high. So you want a PUE that is low even at low loads.”
“There are a number of large enterprises struggling to deploy to the cloud so there’s a healthy market out there. Interestingly, for the first time, you’re seeing churn in the market. There’s a lot of old and inefficient co-location facilities out there. We’re seeing two things: the expansion of cloud and then enterprises using the moving opportunity to downsize – with the ability to ramp up should they need to.”
“It’s a very simple market to explain… when you get your head around the limited scale of it physically you can relate to how it will grow. Traditional real estate people can’t get their head around it. Land and building costs are not the main thing. The main costs are on data centre build-out; the principle switching gear, the cooling units.”
“But look at the surge in the amount of data. Look at how much data a single autonomous car generates and you understand the chatter in the broader market about this industry.”
