Infinity To Open Data Centre In Stockley Park

Despite other operators claiming real estate near London is impossible to find, Infinity has announced it is to build a data centre at Stockley Park.

The 60,00 square foot facility, located near a major business park, will be on-stream in Autumn of this year, and the first part of it is already 50 percent let, Infinity said at the Data Centre World (DCW) event in London this week.

We’ve got the power

When Computacenter opened a 100,000 square foot Tier IV data centre in Romford in 2009, it predicted this would be the last major data centre within London’s M25 orbital motorway.

Infinity is proud to have overcome the main obstacle to building new data centres – the availability of electrical power. “We pride ourselves on our ability fo find power where no one else can,” Infinity marketing manager Chris Baldry told TechWeekEurope, at DCW.

The Stockley Park data centre currently has 15MVA of power, and can expand this when needed, Baldry said. It brings Infinity’s total power within the M25 to 130MVA.

For the security conscious, this location is a genuine “no-fly zone”, because of its closeness to the tightly controlled airspace of London’s Heathrow airport, and is out towards the West where tech firms locate along the M4 motorway.

Infinity did not quote an exact power utilisation efficiency (PUE) for the facility, as it has yet to be populated and measured, but predicted it would be low (as close to one as possible).

Location as well as power

Despite the growth of the cloud, and moves to shift data centres well away  into cooler climates, Inifinity still believes its customers need to be close to their servers.

“This important addition to our network of facilities will address the demands of those organisations both outgrowing current West London facilities and those looking to halve their energy usage by moving to modern efficient facilities,” said Martin Lynch chief executive of Infinity.

Infinity has its eye on transport links which will determine where office developments crop up, and plans to develop along the new high frequency, high capacity Crossrail service which covers 37 stations in London and the South East, so that its customers can “travel from one end of their infrastructure to the other in under 40 minutes”.

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