San Francisco-based real estate giant Digital Realty has opened the doors of its latest London data centre, “Cloud House” on the company’s Digital Docklands estate.
Cloud House is one of four data centres on the Isle of Dogs site. It spans just over 119,000 square feet, with four data floors and the typical accoutrements of a large data centre: meeting rooms, loading bay, secured storage areas.
The Digital Docklands campus is designed to be a carrier-neutral hub. It provides access to 85+ carriers, ISPs and internet exchange providers (IXPs), with direct cloud access via AWS’s Direct Connect and Oracle’s Fast Connect. (Digital Realty says it has a total of 96.4MW of IT load across its five London facilities).
Its opening comes amid an arms race to provide data centre capacity, in particular to hyperscale cloud providers. As Computer Business Review earlier reported, public cloud heavyweights have procured a whopping 100MW of co-location data centre capacity in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris in the past 12 months.
With enterprise software firms such as AWS-hosted Slack also announcing plans to provide European data residency to customers, there appears to be little sign of a slowdown in demand, with many financial services customers still in the very early stages of migrating from on-premises systems to the cloud.
Digital Docklands
The opening comes as London looks set to experience a multibillion-pound technology boom, according to a Development Economics study sponsored by Digital Realty and published today to coincide with the opening.
The study, “Digital Capitals Index: London,” examines the value that AI, the IoT, 5G and Blockchain will deliver to the capital over the next decade.
It found that the four technologies combined will add £6.25 billion to London’s economy in 2019, with IoT contributing the most at £3.09 billion (49 percent of the total) primarily through improvements in operational efficiencies.
AI is the second most impactful with an expected contribution in 2019 of £1.99 billion (32 percent of the total) through applications such as combating money laundering. Blockchain will generate £1.04 billion of value (17 percent), and 5G, still in its early stages, will add £130 million (2 percent).
By 2029, however, these new technologies are tipped to contribute an estimated £24.29 billion to London’s economy
“Cities around the world are on the cusp of a technology revolution that could drive substantial economic growth,” said Jeff Tapley, EMEA MD Digital Realty. He added: “The opening of our new facility in the Digital Docklands underscores Digital Realty’s commitment to supporting the technology revolution in London.
“Businesses can rely on our secure platform to connect to and deliver the critical technology they need to succeed, from AI to IoT, from one city and country to anywhere in the world in order to efficiently grow and scale.”
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