Says it will support European expansion and Westbound Asian expansion and growth
New facility custom-designed with strong eco-credentials to help meet growing demand for managed cloud services in UK, Europe and Asia Pacific
Rackspace has unveiled its new UK data centre. Based in Crawley, West Sussex, the 130,000 square foot data centre will help to meet the growing demand for managed cloud services in the UK and Europe.
The facility has been designed with the specific needs of Rackspace customers in mind, encompassing top speeds, availability and energy efficiency.
The new operation is the first data centre in the UK to make use of innovative ‘indirect outside air’ cooling technology on this scale, without mechanical cooling, which means the overhead energy required to operate the data centre has been cut by almost 80 per cent.
The Crawley data centre was designed to maximise compatibility to and compliance with Open Compute Project standards. By using Open Compute Project designs, Rackspace has been able to realise outstanding scalability and energy efficiency opportunities in the hardware it deploys. The data centre delivers less weight, less waste and less wattage than traditional server designs.
Mark Roenigk, COO, Rackspace, commented, “This is our tenth global data centre now open to customers across the world and comes at a time when we are seeing more and more organisations preferring to keep their data closer to home. We are extremely proud to offer services for managing the clouds of dynamic business functions as they grow in the multi-device era. To have built a facility that is a starting point for boosting the adoption of more efficient technologies in the UK and Europe is a great reward in itself.”
The new data centre, which is the size of two football fields and holds up to 50,000 physical servers, occupies a 15 acre site. The initial build was constructed in 15 months and took approximately 500,000 man hours. It provides 6MW capacity across two data suites, and will eventually comprise of four data suites with a total 12MW capacity. The site allows for further expansion up to 30MW, and a staggered build approach maximises year-on-year advances in technology and efficiency gains.
