VIRTUS Plans Fourth London Data Centre Amid Rising Cloud Demands

UK-based data centre provider VIRTUS is planning to build a fourth facility in London to meet growing demands for cloud infrastructure from local businesses.

The upcoming data centre, expected to be open for business by summer 2018, will be called LONDON3 and will add to VIRTUS’ existing facilities in Slough, Hayes and Enfield.

It will provide an additional 3,000 net technical metres (NTM) of IT space for local firms, increasing VIRTUS portfolio in London to over 50MW across four sites and making it one of the biggest providers in the UK capital.

Local cloud

LONDON3 will be closely linked to the Slough facility, creating an expandable and secure connected campus between the two buildings to serve businesses across industries such as financial services, life sciences, education and the public sector.

“The rapid adoption of cloud and digital business across all industries is driving the need for the kind of high quality and innovative data centre space that VIRTUS develops and operates,” said Neil Cresswell, CEO of VIRTUS Data Centres.

“We have seen increasing demand for high performance solutions as well as more and more requirements to connect to cloud providers and other services. Our data centres are where the cloud lives in London, so they are in high demand from service providers and users wanting to better interconnect their applications and data across public and private clouds, and get closer to their consumers.”

The move certainly comes at a good time, as data centre colocation activity hit a record high across Europe in 2016 with 155MW of take-up throughout Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris.

VIRTUS will, however, face stiff competition in the capital. Many of the major cloud players have invested heavily in London facilities in recent months, with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft opening data centres towards the end of last year.

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