Manchester, 1st March 2011
UK Grid (www.ukgrid.net), the largest provider of carrier neutral colocation solutions in Northern England, today announced that work is to commence immediately to expand one of its Manchester based data centre facilities, Synergy House.
The three month expansion project will bring two additional colocation zones online during Q2 2011. Creating two new data halls on separate floors in the North Wing of the building, areas DC4 & DC5 will release an additional 6000sq ft at Synergy House for a range of colocation offerings starting from quarter racks up to private suites for 5 full racks and above.
Power to the site has been upgraded and a second dedicated substation has been built to serve the new areas. Once upgrade works have been completed, power availability at the 23,000sq ft facility will be increased to a total of 4MW and the second substation will ensure mains power redundancy from existing zones at Synergy House – DC1 and DC2.
In order to expand connectivity options into the new zones, Geo Networks have brought their national fibre network into the North Wing as well as the South Wing, giving fully diverse national fibre connectivity.
Rob Garbutt, UK Grid CEO comments, “This announcement is great news for UKGrid, our clients and any organisation looking for quality data centre space outside of London. With existing Synergy zones DC1 and DC2 at capacity and DC3 at 50%, the expansion should allow us to satisfy demand over the next 12-18 months. It’s an exciting period as we’re simultaneously executing on our longer term and large scale expansion strategy to ensure a continuation of high quality data centre space estimated to see us through into 2015.”
The overall target PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) for all Synergy House data halls is 1.32 making the colocation facility one of the most efficient data centres in the UK. To continue with their ‘Environmentally Responsible’ approach UKGrid state that Synergy House is and will continue to be completely carbon neutral owing to their forestry projects that offset all carbon emissions from their data centres.
Patrick Doyle, UK Grid CTO comments; “Whilst we do our upmost to minimise energy wastage, a sizeable data centre provider will always have a significant carbon footprint, so we’ve invested heavily to balance our impact through meaningful environmental projects such as the UK Grid forestry. This plantation offsets all carbon emissions generated at all of our facilities and will do so well into the future. As well as being environmentally responsible, this means our clients can immediately claim that their UK Grid hosted IT platform is one hundred per cent carbon neutral’.
The project is expected to create up to 10 additional jobs in Manchester and the company’s projected turnover from the redeveloped site once full is £6.5million.
About UK Grid
UK Grid are the largest independent provider of Carrier Neutral Colocation solutions in Northern England. With a network of business class data centre facilities UKGrid provide solutions to organisations looking to outsource their data centre in order to secure and protect critical server, data, applications and telecommunications equipment. All UKGrid colocation facilities provide power protection, high capacity cooling systems, fire protection, high levels of security and a wide range of network and communications options. All UKGrid’s facilities are 100% carbon neutral.
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