Equinix To Open £47.5m Data Centre In Slough

Equinix, one of the world’s largest operators of carrier-neutral data centres and Internet exchanges, has started building a new UK campus in Slough.

The ‘LD6’ facility will become the third Equinix property in the Berkshire town, and its sixth data centre built to serve British businesses. It will eventually offer 86,000 square feet of space, enough to house 2,770 cabinets.

Built according to the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) platinum certification guidelines, LD6 could become one of the most energy efficient data centres in the country. It is aimed at the financial services, content, cloud and enterprise segments.

Equinix has also announced a new £36m data centre in Melbourne, Australia, with a capacity of 1,500 cabinets.

Servers for London

The company has invested $79 million (£47.5m) into LD6, a data centre that will feature an innovative air system which will utilise mass air cooling technology with indirect heat exchange and 100 percent natural ventilation.

Equinix is well-known for its sustainable designs. For exmple, its data centre at the AM3 science park in Amsterdam is one of the ‘greenest’ in the world – it uses fuel cell reactions to manage fire suppression instead of water or gas, and generates 800,000 kilowatt hours of its own electricity per year.

The first phase of the work is expected to be complete by the middle of 2015, and will provide initial capacity of 1,385 cabinets.

“LD6 is a hugely exciting project; the facility will be the most advanced data centre in the UK. We are committed to providing not just continuity but also continuous improvement for our current and future customers; this latest addition to our thriving campus will also set new standards in efficiency and sustainability,” said Russell Poole, managing director of Equinix UK.

Once the new facility is built, the total footprint of Equinix in Slough will reach 388,000 square feet. The complex, which has access to several transatlantic cables, offers latency in the region of 4 milliseconds to Frankfurt and 30 milliseconds to New York. As a result, it is favoured by financial services businesses, and accounts for 25 percent of the total European equities trade count.

In addition to a new data centre, the company has invested $37 million (£22m) in the acquisition of its existing LD4 and LD5 campus buildings, and entered into long-term ground leases for the entire LD4, LD5 and LD6 campuses.

Equinix says these deals give it a 50-year control of one of the UK’s largest, fastest-growing and most network-dense data centre locations, and plenty of room for future expansion.

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