Is London’s Newest Data Centre One Of The World’s Most Efficient?

VIRTUS Data Centres has opened a new data centre in Hayes, West London.

LONDON2 has been designed and purpose built in an effort to be one of the most efficient data centres in the the world, to help customers provide better, faster performing and more flexible digital IT services at lower cost.

VIRTUS has used its ‘intelligent by design‘ principles to deliver what it describes as a modular, highly efficient facility. LONDON2 is designed to the BREEAM ‘Excellent’ standard, has been awarded Tier III certification by the Uptime Institute, and VIRTUS claims it delivers the lowest operational costs of a premium London data centre through the use of technology-driven cost to build and operate optimisation.

Renewable energy

Powered by renewable energy sources, it is thought that the data centre will also be the first in London to deploy a ground breaking indirect fresh-air evaporative cooling technology, which could dramatically decrease energy consumption, bringing site power usage effectiveness (PUE) to below 1.2 and delivering substantial total cost of ownership (TCO) reductions to VIRTUS’ customers.

LONDON2 offers customers 11.4MW of IT load across 65,000 sq. ft. of Tier III net technical space with ultra-high power densities of up to 40kW per rack, N+N redundancy on UPS, and N+1 on all other critical services. The site is on a highly secure campus, away from main roads behind five metre-high security fences, with 24/7 on site security, technical support and monitoring centres to maintain VIRTUS’ 100% uptime record.

Built in the connectivity ‘Goldilocks zone’, close enough to central London for low latency performance and active-active replication, but far away enough to meet government and financial services business continuity standards, LONDON2 has already attracted five customers.

These include the expansion of existing cloud service providers C4L and Exponential-e, extending the VIRTUS cloud and financial services ecosystems from LONDON1 to LONDON2. In addition, it opens with more than 10 carriers, six of whom are fibre owner/operators – BT, Virgin Media, COLT, euNetworks, Zayo and SSE, and it is strategically positioned between existing fibre routes running to the north and south of the data centre.

LONDON2 is also said to provide customers with complete transparency and control of their colocated data centre usage through the VIRTUS Intelligent Portal (VIP) – the industry’s first free Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution for colocation customers. Its self-service tools allow clients to visualise and manage space, power, cooling and energy efficiency through a single pane of glass, either remotely or from one of the customer-dedicated offices or café areas in the facility.

The data centre has six data halls, which are all capable of being subdivided, allowing clients to have anything from a cabinet in a shared space to their own suite or data hall with dedicated power and cooling.

Neil Cresswell, CEO, VIRTUS Data Centres, said: “The opening of LONDON2 is another significant milestone for VIRTUS Data Centres.  LONDON2 is an award-winning, world class facility and London’s premier new Tier III certified data centre. It offers our London customers one of the world’s most agile, connected and efficient data centre solutions, and is the most efficient in London, with indirect fresh-air cooling for improved customer energy efficiency, flexible contracts, unique VIRTUS Intelligent Design technology and a broad and deep range of connectivity options, all combining to give a low Total Cost of Service for Tier III certified quality.

“We are delighted that the project has been completed on time, on budget and that five valued customers as well as 10 carriers have signed up for LONDON2 before the doors have opened. It all highlights the growing appetite for intelligent, fully-optimised data centres in metro locations in the UK, close to large user bases for better application and content performance for today’s new digital economy. This is all hugely encouraging as we plan for the next part of the VIRTUS story, LONDON3.”

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