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Telehouse adds fifth datacenter to Docklands campus in London, UK

Refurbed former Thomson Reuters DC adds 12,000 sqm to holdings

Colocation firm Telehouse has opened its fifth datacenter in London Docklands, claiming it will be the company’s largest global facility once fully up and running. The firm has invested £223 million into refurbishing the building, which was formerly the site of a datacenter operated by Thomson Reuters.

Telehouse, the datacenter subsidiary of Japanese telecoms giant KDDI, has just opened up the first floor of colocation space at the Telehouse South facility. This has the capacity for up to 668 racks and 2MW of power, with an upgrade to 2.7MW for an additional data hall scheduled for the end of 2023.

Once buildout work is fully completed at the site, the Telehouse South facility is expected to comprise a total of 12,000 sqm of colocation space and provide power capacity for 18MW of IT infrastructure.

London remains a key location for companies and Telehouse said the new carrier-neutral facility is suited to serve businesses looking for low latency connectivity to London's financial district.

"London Docklands remains an important strategic location for us and one of the most critical interconnection points in the world," KDDI Europe and Telehouse Europe MD Seigo Fukuhara said in a statement.

"As businesses continue to accelerate their digital transformation post-pandemic and demand for digital services grows, Telehouse South offers enterprises greater efficiency through scalable hybrid cloud infrastructure, with faster access to data and applications and the flexibility to grow,” he added.

There is currently high demand for colocation space in and around London, according to Andrew Buss, research director for European Enterprise Infrastructure at IDC.

"A lot of enterprises still have their IT infrastructure not in good facilities, perhaps in server rooms or another part of their offices, and reliability is often not up to scratch, so colocation is the best way to start to transform your IT delivery," he said.

As a result, companies providing datacenter facilities such as Rackspace, Equinix and Digital Realty are currently seeing 10 percent growth per year, Buss said, but this requires ongoing investment in new infrastructure such as the Telehouse South site. Telehouse said that its total investment in the Docklands campus is likely to hit £1 billion by 2025.

Telehouse opened Telehouse North, its first datacenter at its Docklands campus, in 1990. Since then it has added Telehouse West and East and Telehouse North Two was opened in 2016. By refurbishing the old Thomson Reuters site instead of building a new facility from the ground up, the firm said it was able to get the new Telehouse South datacenter up and running in less than a year from acquiring it.

Buss told us he understands that a major part of the work in Telehouse delivering this new site was digging up the road to install the fibre connections between it and the other Telehouse facilities, in order to effectively link them all together as one single giant virtual site.

"The key is that companies want better IT delivery, so datacenters are much more than just about power, space and cooling these days. It's about connectivity, sustainability and ecosystem participation, where there are lots of applications that need to talk to each other," Buss said.

Telehouse said this connectivity comprises a network of 7,000 dark fibres, linking Telehouse South with the existing four data centres, giving customers connectivity with over 900 partners, including BT Openreach, Colt Technology Services, and the London Internet Exchange (LINX).

The business also claimed that Telehouse South is powered entirely by renewable energy procured from certified wind, solar, biomass and hydro generators, and the Telehouse is now classed as an ultra-small emitter under the UK Emissions Trading Scheme.

For the year ended 31 March 2021, Telehouse Europe reported revenues of £192.6 million ($252.4 million) [PDF], the bulk of which (£144.50 million or $189.22 million) were from its UK operations while the rest were for colo services in France. This was up from £172.677 million ($226 million) the year before, while operating profits were up to £95.792 million ($125.39 million) up from 88.616 million ($116 million).

KDDI Corporation has a global network covering Europe, America and Asia-Pacific and reported [PDF] revenues of ¥5.312 trillion ($46.58 billion) in the year to March 31, 2021 along with operating income of ¥1.037 trillion ($8.39 billion). ®

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