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February 3, 2010
BT and Logica Move into NGD Europe's Mammoth Data Center in Wales Ahead of Schedule
Yours Truly has been following the progress of the awesome 19,000-rack, 75,000-square meter (807,293-square foot) data center in Newport, South Wales, built by Next Generation Data Ltd. Indeed, on December 14, 2009, I posted an extensive interview with NGD's Chairman, Simon Taylor. Microsoft's massive new data center in Chicago may be impressive at 700,000 square feet, but when Arne Josefsberg, general manager of infrastructure services for Microsoft's data center operations said, "I think, I'm not 100 percent sure, but I think this could be the largest data center in the world," he obviously hasn't heard of NGD's tier 3 mega data center in South Wales. Whereas the Microsoft Chicago site has about 30 megawatts of capacity, the NGD Europe data center has a high capacity 180 MVA power supply delivered direct from a super grid. Moreover, the NGD Europe data center's 19,000 racks can be arranged into self-contained data halls of various sizes all with independent services, resilient power and cooling systems. It also offers a variety of on-site high-speed, low latency carrier interconnects.
Today, NGD announces that two large-scale custom built data halls for BT and Logica have been completed in record time at the new NGD Europe data center, allowing both anchor tenants to commence managed services operations ahead of schedule. BT is the fomer British Telecom, and Logica is a leading IT and business services company, employing 40,000 people, that provides business consulting, systems integration, and IT and business process outsourcing services.
The arrival of these two major data center tenants follows Next Generation Data winning long-term contracts from BT and Logica last autumn worth over £20M for the provision of space and infrastructure at NGD Europe.
Build-outs for both client organizations were finished in less than 16 weeks compared to the industry average of 24 weeks and in spite of the challenging weather conditions during late December 2009 and early January 2010.
“Making these halls ready in record time for BT and Logica was largely down to excellent planning and project management by our resident and highly experienced operations team, the caliber and professionalism of our chosen infrastructure partners and sheer hard work by all concerned,” says Simon Taylor, Chairman of Next Generation Data. Taylor adds: “Demand for space at NGD Europe is growing fast from corporate, government and cloud computing organizations which are fast realising that our out-of-town facility offers them much more scale, power, resilience, connectivity and security at far less cost compared to the traditional data center locations in London and the South East. We are already preparing two further custom halls for client occupation very soon.”
NGD Europe is being used by BT to deploy hundreds of server racks to deliver increased capacity for IT and communications services provided to business customers in the UK and globally; Logica is using the facility to help manage the IT requirements of its government clients.