Equinix to open sixth London data centre in Slough

Equinix, Inc. will build a new data center called LD6 in its highly successful London Slough campus in response to consistent demand from customers in the financial services, content, cloud and enterprise segments.

The new LD6 data center will provide total capacity of approximately 8,000 square meters (86,000 square feet; 2,770 cabinet equivalents). With $79 million of capital expenditures invested, the first phase is scheduled to open in in the first half of 2015 and will provide initial capacity of 1,385 cabinets.
Additionally, Equinix has invested $37 million in the acquisition of its existing LD4 and LD5 campus buildings and concurrently entered into long-term ground leases for the entire LD4, LD5 and LD6 campus with SEGRO plc. This acquisition gives Equinix effective 50-year control of one of the UK’s largest, fastest-growing and most network-dense data center campuses, supporting customer continuity and future expansion.
Highlights / Key Facts
· LD6 aims to become one of a small number of Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) platinum-accredited energy efficient data centers in the UK. Equinix plans to achieve this with the aid of an innovative air system which will utilise mass air cooling technology with indirect heat exchange and 100 percent natural ventilation. This will contribute to LD6 having lower energy consumption and a smaller carbon footprint than other facilities of its kind.

· Once LD6 is complete, the Equinix London Slough campus will provide over 36,000 square meters (388,000 square feet) of net premium colocation space interconnected by more than 1,000 diverse dark fiber links – increasing scale and resilience.

· With over 90 network service providers and access to a range of transatlantic cables, the London Slough campus is one of the busiest network nodes in the UK, and offers latency in the region of 30 milliseconds to New York and 4 milliseconds to Frankfurt, making it an ideal high-performance hub for cloud and content service provision.

· A key growth driver for the launch of LD6 has been a major shift of financial services firms from high-risk, power-challenged data centers in the City of London and Docklands to the Equinix London Slough data center campus. The campus currently houses over 170 financial services businesses – and has the largest array of trading venues across multiple asset classes in Europe – which collectively account for 25 percent of the total European equities trade count.