Rackspace Opens UK’s Latest Data Centre In Crawley
Rackspace’s West Sussex build goes live, claiming to be one of the most environmentally friendly in Europe
Cloud manager Rackspace has cut the ribbon on its new UK data centre in Crawley, West Sussex today, its tenth such facility across the globe.
The 130,000ft² data centre, opened in partnership with Digital Realty, touts a PUE of 1.15 and claims to one of the greenest data centres currently running in the UK.
Environmentally friendly
The data centre is heralded as the “epitome” of 21st century infrastructure engineering, according to Rackspace’s COO Mark Roenigk.
“We partnered with industry leaders to design and deliver one of the most environmentally friendly and reliable data centres in Europe,” he said.
Equivalent to the size of two football fields, the data centre will be able to hold around 50,000 physical servers, and provides 6MW of capacity across two data suites.
Eventually, according to Rackspace, the site will comprises four data suites with a total 12MW capacity. The site allows for further expansion up to 30MW, and a staggered build approach will help with year-on-year advances in technology and efficiency gains.
Outage
In December 2014, the “fanatical support” guru was hit by a DDoS attack which knocked out the firm’s DNS servers for almost 12 hours.
Rackspace posted a status on its Google+ page stating: “On December 21st, at approximately 23:54 CST, backbone engineers identified a UDP DDoS attack targeting the DNS servers in our IAD, ORD, and LON data centers.
“As a result of this issue, authoritative DNS resolution for any new request to the DNS servers began to fail in the affected data centres.”
The firm’s London, Chicago, and North Virginia data centres were affected.
