Brightsolid Plots £5m Aberdeen Data Centre

Cloud computing specialist Brightsolid is to give Google and Amazon a run for their money with the design of a new energy-efficient data centre in Scotland.

It said construction of the the new tier III facility will begin this month, with the facility expected to go live next April.

New Facility

The new data centre will be located in the Scottish city of Aberdeen, often referred to as the Granite City. Nowadays however, Aberdeen is considered to be the UK’s energy capital because of its location close to the North Sea oilfields, and it accounts for 28 percent of Scotland’s GDP.

Aberdeen is also poised to become the best digitally connected city in Scotland, after network infrastructure provider CityFibre last month revealed plans to build a city-wide, state-of-the-art pure fibre network in Aberdeen. It said the network would create Scotland’s first Gigabit City.

Brightsolid meanwhile is investing £5m to build the facility, which will be located at the Aberdeen Journals’ Lang Stracht site.

“Aberdeen is the Energy Capital of Europe, and as such requires a global technology link for the market,” said Brightsolid CEO Richard Higgs. “We see our new Tier 3+ state-of-the-art Aberdeen data centre as an opportunity to help position the city as a global tech hub.”

Initially, the 2200 sq. metre site will host 200 high density racks with capacity of 25 kW per rack. But the owners have designed it to expand to twice this size, allowing for storage of 400 Petabytes of data.

And it seems that Brightsolid intends to make the new facility as energy efficient as possible. Indeed, it is working with data centre energy specialist Keysource on the build, which has been designed to achieve a Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) of 1.25. The average UK facility has a PUE of 2.

Brightsolid points out that this would make the data centre substantially greener than the industry standard, and would place it on a par with data centres from the likes of Google and Amazon.

“The Aberdeen facility has been designed to the highest technical spec,” said Higgs. “It will feature Ecrofris cooling technology and employ a full data centre monitoring system including environmental, plant, power and PUE monitoring.

“For the last 18 months we have been expanding our customers and knowledge in this vital sector,” he added. “The new facility must and will enable outstanding operational excellence whilst driving down cost. We will also be bringing our full innovation and cloud range directly into Aberdeen. So this commitment is significant.”

Scottish Expansion

There has been a number of data centre developments recently in Scotland.

Last month Pulsant announced that it has expanded its South Gyle tier 3 data centre site, with the construction of a new facility.

In April, AOC Group revealed plans for a £40 million data centre in Glenrothes, which would be the first data centre in the UK entirely run from locally-generated renewable energy. The facility will be powered by electricity generated from wood waste by a biomass converter. The centre is expected to go live in 2015.

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