Blades, SAN’s & high density switches have all been designed to free up valuable space in the datacentre but it seems no one thought about the power consumption these beasts require. How are UK datacentre providers keeping up with the power demands of new technology

Data centre power not in-line with the technology it supplies

Advancements in technology over the past years with virtualisation and small form factor hardware have seen a massive reduction in space required to build IT infrastructures. These environments generally have a high demand for power and the established data centres are not particularly well designed to supply that power to a cabinet footprint.

The trend in making everything smaller has only recently been common and most data centres in London and Docklands were built before the demand to supply high density footprints.

We find ourselves increasingly supplying customers twice the amount of space they need to run half full cabinets of “Blade” servers or storage arrays.

With space at an absolute premium in the central London area many data centre builders have looked further afield to build their facilities to server the South East’s huge demand for data centre space with high density power.

Data centres have been built on and around the M25, out in the M4 corridor, Kent and North in to Bedfordshire and beyond. Getting outside of the square mile makes sense for the power requirements as new facilities are built with the “Blade” type server environments in mind.

However, for every cabinet we sell in these outer London locations we still sell 10 in the City & Docklands area. The reason for this is simple, logistics. Although these facilities lay-on an amazing service for remote hands, we find customers every day who have a London engineering base that MUST be able to get to the data centre if needed.

Something has got to give soon, more new data centres need to be built inside the M25 preferably commutable to on London Public Transport to appease the need of engineers to be able to attend when necessary but also with the current IT environments of small form factor, power heavy devices to be racked in more dense footprints in mind.

For more information regarding our data centres drop me an email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call me on 0844 984 1717

Tags: Colocation, Data Centres, High Power Colocation, Power Density, Colo