Rackspace Opens UK’s Latest Data Centre In Crawley

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.