Newcastle Will Play Host To UK’s Largest Purpose Built Data Centre

Newcastle will be the home of the UK’s largest purpose built data centre, courtesy of freshly-minted company Stellium, bringing more server-based services to the North.

Stellium is founded by the Noel Meaney, the founder of Citadel100 Datacenters, euNetworks and Seafibre Networks and will be targeted at delivering wholesale, rack and cloud services, with the goal of being specifically designed handling varied computing tasks and workloads.

The new data centre’s campus, due to be fully operational by the end of 2016, is being touted by Stellium as having the power, scale and flexibility to provide enterprise-level cloud infrastructure, powered shell facilities, and dedicated and shared co-location services.

Server Angel of the North

The new data centre as its one dedicated power supply from an adjacent National Grid inter connector, which delivers up to 80MVA through four 20MVA 11kv feeds from two dedicated SSE substations. This means the Tier 3+ data centre has a power usage effectiveness of 1.16. Stellium also boasted that the data centre has been built to the BREEAM Excellent and Outstanding Standards.

Stellium’s data centre also brings with it a 40 kilometre metro multi-duct fibre network, the first of its kind in Newcastle, which connects the data centre to multiple long-haul and international internet carriers; this will give customers of the company a high-capacity and low latency connection to London, Europe and the US.

With Newcastle selected as the location for Stellium’s data centre, it indicated that the city’s tech hub, which forms part of the so-called Northern Power house of growth businesses, is in rude health as Stellium could have easily chosen to situate that data centre in Slough where the UK’s second major access point to the Internet’s global backbone cabling is located.

“Newcastle and the North East is a hotbed for digital innovation, and this announcement cements our position as the fastest growing tech sector outside of London,” said Nick Forbes, leader of Newcastle City Council.

“Combined with the £30 million National Institute for Smart Data Innovation on Newcastle Science Central and world-leading and renowned research at our universities, having this kind of infrastructure will now allow us to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the explosion in big data.

“These unique assets will provide access to new international markets, attract further investment, encourage business growth and help develop skills and create jobs of the future. I’m delighted that Stellium is investing in our region, which adds to the air of excitement currently being generated around the North East’s tech scene.”

That air of excitement is legitimate as well given how Newcastle seems to have the knack for attracting data centre companies, such as the Cobalt. The city is also becomingly increasingly connected with high speed broadband thanks to a BDUK deal that made Newcastle on of Europe’s most connected cities back in 2013.

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