Colt Expands Data Centre Capacity In UK, Germany

In another sign of the recovering economic outlook, colocation service provider Colt has expanded two of its data centres in Europe, citing increased industry demand.

Colt increased capacity at its London 3 facility, located in Welwyn Garden City north east of London. It also expanded its facility in Hamburg, Germany, adding 2MW of power to its data centre space.

Customer Demand

According to Colt there is “increased demand for secure and flexible colocation solutions.” It said there has been continuous growth in the colocation market, with the European market for colocation expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.6 percent over the next 5 years.

The Welwyn Garden City has grown by additional 1000m2 of data halls, bringing the total space available within the facility to 6,500m2. Likewise in Germany, it has added 565m2 to its Hamburg facility.

The London 3 data centre is carrier neutral and is the flagship facility for Colt, encompassing a total of 11 halls. This data centre is built with Colt’s well known modular data centre design, first revealed to the world back in 2010.

The company’s modular data centres come in units of 500m2 and utilise fresh air cooling. The units are themselves put together from around a dozen separate sections which can be shipped on lorries, either to the customer’s premises or a Colt managed data centre site.

“The expansion of our London data centre 3 facility highlights the increasing demand for flexible data centre space in the UK,” said Detlef Spang, EVP Data Centre Services at Colt. “It was September 2012 we last expanded the facility, however we hit capacity at the beginning of 2014, triggering the build of the next two data halls.”

“It also draws our attention to the changing demand for data centres: it’s not just about size or location, it’s about efficiency, reliability and security, which is exactly what we aim to offer with the London 3 facility,” said Spang.”

London 3 provides a total power provision of 33 MVA and has a Design PUE of 1.21. Last year Colt revealed that it had cut the energy used in its European data centres by nearly a fifth.

It said at the time that the process had taken it three years, and it had managed to reduce its data centres’ energy usage by 18 percent. This resulted in it cutting 43 GigaWatt hours (GWh), and €4 million from its annual electricity bill, as well as reducing its carbon footprint by 15,000 tonnes.

German Growth

Meanwhile the Hamburg 1 facility currently has 535m2 of built space, but is in the process of being expanded by 565m2 (completion expected this August). Again, Colt said the expansion of this facility was driven by customer demand.

Hamburg apparently accounts for approximately 5 percent of the total of Germany’s data centre supply.

“As two important markets in Europe for colocation, demand in both our London and Hamburg facilities is increasing exponentially,” said Spang. “We see the increase in demand as a positive sign that businesses are becoming more focused on their data and the importance of where it is located, both in the short and long term.”

Colt operates 20 data centres across 15 markets in total. It has facilities in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Milan, The Netherlands, Paris, Turin, and Zurich.

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