Equinix Opens London £ 90 Million Data Center in Rust Belt • The Register



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Equinix has opened a £ 90m colocation facility in Godforsaken Slough – its ninth in Greater London and its 12th place in the UK.

The flagship building, code-named LD7, offers immediate space for 1,750 server cabinets and will expand to 2,625 cabinets in the future, the company said.

The data center is located in an industrial suburb of Slough – the unofficial capital of the United Kingdom, home to smaller storage facilities, home to more data centers than any other location in the country, including three Equinix facilities existing.

The LD7 is equipped with a chilled water cooling system, combined with adiabatic pre-cooling. It provides access to more than 90 network providers and several transatlantic fiber optic cables linking London and the United States. Equinix says this allows 30 milliseconds of latency compared to New York.

The project is part of the investment of 295 million pounds sterling of the company in the British infrastructure in 2018-2019. In addition to the all-new LD7, Equinix spends £ 94m to extend LD9 (formerly known as Telecity's Powergate), £ 82m to extend LD10 (formerly operated by IO) and £ 24m to extend LD4.

Including all ongoing expansion projects, Equinix will have invested more than $ 1.2 billion in British infrastructure.

The company said its expansion plans were supporting London as a "financial center" and one of the major business cities, regardless of the endless negotiations around the start. from Blighty of the European Union.

The injection of funds for LD7 was revealed last year and caught the attention of the troubled British prime minister.

"Equinix's investment reflects the growing demand for digital financial services in the City of London and is a vote of confidence for its future as the world's leading financial center. That's exactly what we We want to lead, "British Prime Minister Theresa May told the Confederation of British Industries in November 2018.

"London has maintained its position as one of the most important connection points in the world," said Russell Poole, CEO of Equinix UK, not to mention adding the often heard warning "despite ongoing negotiations on Brexit".

He added: "[T]its new data center will be a useful addition to our growing campus, the London Slough, while also supporting the roll-out of 5G in the UK. "

At the same time, LD9 and LD10 will each have space dedicated to very large infrastructures, mainly reserved for the main cloud providers.

Hyperscale cloud companies are an increasingly important customer category for colos. Cloud-generated revenue grew 24 percent year-over-year in wholesale colocation and 16 percent in the retail colocation segment, according to Synergy. Compare that to Colo's 10% overall growth rate and you'll see where Equinix will earn money. The company's customers include the world's three largest cloud providers, AWS, Azure and GCP.

"Many Equinix customers are also very large customers and work with Equinix partly because we allow them to work with their very large suppliers," said Eric Shwartz, Director of Strategy and Product Development. development at Equinix. The reg earlier this month.

"It is important to develop these relationships – we have been pretty transparent about the fact that the return on a very large scale deployment is lower than that of our more traditional activities – but it's still a return and a deployment of attractive capital. "

Equinix operates more than 200 data centers in 52 geographic markets. ®

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