Savvis Doubles Data Centre Capacity In Slough

hosting and colocation specialist Savvis has grown its footprint in the Royal county of Berskhire, expanding its data centre space in Slough to 100,000 square foot and spread 8.88 MegaWatts of power across the site’s two data centres.

The new data centre sees the company effectively tripling its UK presence over that of hosting and cloud players such as Rackspace.

Come, friendly servers, fall on Slough…

The ‘LO5’ facility is the second Savvis data centre in Slough, and its sixth in the UK. Rackspace operates two data centres in the UK. Savvis meanwhile as a whole operates 53 data centres around the world, and boasts 2.2 million square feet of data centre floor space globally.

“This investment marks a significant milestone in Savvis’ commitment to serve the growing infrastructure needs of the European market,” said Jeff Von Deylen, president of Savvis. “We have nearly doubled capacity in Slough to meet growing demand and give businesses in the region the services they need to grow.”

The company says that the new facility is needed to make room for the growing colocation, cloud and managed hosting needs in Europe.

Savvis operates a “campus” model for the Slough data centres, building new data centres on the same site, which it says is a better fit considering the rising energy costs in the UK. Savvis says the campus approach lets it maximise power efficiency by sharing infrastructure, and it is planning to build out the LO5 electrical power load in phases, beginning with an initial 2.4 MW at LO5. The company says it has applied this campus model to data centres on the East coast of the United States to similar effect.

The new Savvis LO5 data centre offers an initial 35,000 square feet of raised floor space. It is designed to support power densities in excess of 150 watts per square foot.

A Savvis spokesman told TechweekEurope that the company opened its first data centre (LO1) in Slough in 2008. Within the first 18 months, it had sold out its first floor. Now instead of just continuing to expand an existing data centre, Savvis opted to build a completely separate data centre, which shares infrastructure with its existing Savvis facility in the town, using the same security access points etc.

…it’s only fit for data now

So why is Slough proving to be such a popular destination for data centres? Well firstly its location outside the M25 neatly fulfills disaster recovery needs as it allows London-based firms to safely store their data offsite. The town is also close enough to London to allow server-hugging IT managers easy access to their equipment.

Slough also boasts the largest trading estate under single ownership in Europe. Indeed it is said to be the third most productive town in the UK, with 4,600 organisations in the borough. It is also a hub for many telecom firms, which means that there is plentiful network connectivity, allowing Savvis to simply plug into existing world class fibre connections without the need to build from scratch.

“The success of our existing data centre in Slough confirms that businesses view this area as a strategic geographic location,” Von Deylen said. “Our hosting portfolio in Slough allows businesses in the financial services, consumer brands and other verticals to benefit from Savvis’ carrier diversity, interconnectivity and cloud services.”

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