Datasource January 2018

DATASOURCE DATA CENTRE MARKET NEWS

MOST READ NEWS OF 2017

ISSUE 167 JANUARY 2018

NEWS GLOBAL EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

2

JANUARY 2018

DATASOURCE 01/2018 Chris Jones Head of Data Centres GVA

NEWS

Every month Datasource reports the news and trends that matter to data centre occupiers around the world.

3 World 10

GVAÂ is a leading expert in the UK data centre market.

We specialise in analysing, acquiring and marketing technical space from development land right through to shell & core, operational facilities and colocation suites.

Since 2000 we have transacted 500,000 m2 of technical space and a gigawatt of energy.

Europe, Middle East and Africa

24 Americas 32

Asia Pacific

EVENTS 37 Americas

We work for a full spectrum of public and private sector clients from government entities to investment banks and from data centre providers to property developers.

38 Asia Pacific

How can we help you?

36 Europe, Middle East and Africa

ABOUT US 39 About GVA Data Centres

Our core services

170 offices 27 countries Transacted over

500,000m2 (1 gigawatt) of IT space and power

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

3

JANUARY 2018

WORLD Equinix leads the global leader board for data centres April 2017

41.6% of the world’s PoPs were in North America, 40.4% in EMEA, 9.5% in Asia and 8.5% in Oceania. Operators battled for the top places in each region.

Other providers that ranked well overall include Level 3 Communications and Global Switch which have both ranked in two separate regions.

CenturyLink, whose acquisition of Level 3 Communications has recently received the go ahead from its shareholders, also features in the ranking alongside Colt Technologies Services, Zayo, Metronode, Tata Communications, PCCW, Orange Business Services, and others.

The data centre industry has grown to be one of the most prosperous in today’s economy across most regions worldwide.

Such has led to an increase in recent years around the number of operators in each region and consequently increased competition between providers.

Cloudscene has also unveiled that in this quarter’s leader board, the spread of connectivity was centralised to North America and EMEA.

That competition has now been exposed by Cloudscene’s first ever quarterly leader board that ranks the top ten data centre operators in North America, EMEA, Oceania and Asia.

There were 33 companies that made the inaugural leader board, of which 55% were publicly listed companies. This number rose to 70% for North America and dropped to 40% for Asia.

Of the 14,000+ PoPs managed by the data centre operators, 41.6% of the PoPs were in North America, 40.4% in EMEA, 9.5% in Asia and 8.5% in Oceania.

Cloudscene said the leader board was launched following “increasing demand for more transparency and independent data comparing major colocation service providers worldwide”.

Straight at the top in Q1 2017 is Equinix which ranks number one across all regions. Runner ups include Digital Realty in North America, Interxion in EMEA, NextDC in Oceania and SUNeVision (iAdvantage) in Asia.

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

4

JANUARY 2018

Data centres ‘going green’ to reduce a carbon footprint larger than the airline industry January 2017

As the reliance on the internet has increased exponentially, so too has the demand for data.

In pursuit of a healthier bottom line, some data centre operators are seeking out colder climates (such as Northern Europe) thereby reducing the reliance on power to cool their equipment. Importantly, the cooler locations generally have lower electricity prices which makes a wintery move all the more attractive. Canada, the 7th densest data centre ecosystem in the world, was identified recently as the next potential data centre hotspot given its cold climate and ‘abundance of inexpensive, reliable and green electricity’.

The country also has the added advantage of close proximity to the United States and high levels of privacy protection.

From the way we communicate to the way we bank, hire staff, read news, socialise and even navigate a map; the internet is something the modern world relies on to power our personal and professional lives. To cater for the growing traffic, an extensive global network of data centres has emerged. In fact, there are now over 5,300 colocation data centres around the world. But at what cost to the environment and to the industry as a whole?

Data centres already consume roughly 3% of all globally generated power and account for approximately 2% of greenhouse gas emissions – a carbon footprint equivalent to the airline industry.

In fact, the 416 TWh consumed by the world’s data centres in 2015 was greater than the entire power consumption of the United Kingdom. The numbers are staggering but does ‘going green’ really matter to the modern data centre?

Data centre energy consumption first came under heavy scrutiny in the early 2000s, when experts warned that the rapid growth of the Internet would drive a rise in worldwide fossil fuel emissions.

Thankfully, energy efficiency improvements and innovation in renewable energy has substantially lowered the industry’s power consumption – despite the hunger for data accelerating.

Furthermore, improved hardware efficiency, server virtualisation and the advent of hyper-scale data centres has driven economies of scale for the likes of Microsoft and Amazon. These IT behemoths have mastered the art of maximizing data centre efficiency and server utilisation, as well as improving their power systems and cooling equipment.

And the big names in tech don’t shy away from making bold claims of their own either. Google – already the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable energy – recently stated it was on track to meet its 100% renewable power usage target by 2017. A significant leap considering the company had only reached the 37% mark just two years ago.

Meanwhile all of Apple’s data centres are 100% powered by clean energy and Microsoft’s data centres are all 100% carbon neutral with a 50% renewable energy target in place for 2018. Amazon is also committed to 100% renewable energy use across its Amazon Web Services data centres and expects to reach the 50% mark in 2017.

WORLD

EMEA

Location aside, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), the industry standard metric for assessing data centre energy efficiency, is fueling competition amongst the major operators who are all striving to achieve the lowest PUE to satisfy the expectations of their customers, shareholders and the community.

Telehouse Europe grabbed headlines recently when it unveiled ‘one of the world’s greenest’ data centres. The North Two building in London’s docklands is said to be achieving a PUE of 1.16 thanks to an innovative evaporative cooling system installed across six floors of the building.

On the other side of the globe, the NEXTDC data centre in Port Melbourne has been fitted with one of Australia’s largest solar arrays, enabling customers to choose 100% renewable power for their IT infrastructure. The 400-kilowatt system is offsetting 670 tons of carbon dioxide per annum.

And Equinix, arguably the world’s leader in data centres, claims it is avoiding 122,000 metric tons in CO² emissions – equivalent to taking 26,000 cars off the road – every year thanks to its investment in energy efficiencies. With the spotlight firmly on an industry that is growing considerably fast and consuming more power than entire countries, data centre operators and tech giants alike recognize that energy usage is of both commercial and public importance.

The value of ‘going green’ not only matters to the modern data centre, it’s a top priority and key business strategy for operators seeking a competitive advantage and significant savings to their bottom line. Replacing traditional methods with more sustainable practices to power data centres is not only environmentally responsible, it’s intelligent business.

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

5

JANUARY 2018

Elon musk gets closer to worldwide internet dream December 2016

‘This is the golden age for data centres,’ global cloud exchange CEO opens up on the huge opportunities that lie ahead February 2017

Here is how data centre owners will be the big winners in the next decade as the connected world expands the data economy.

“We are going faster than we ever thought.” These were the words of William Barney, CEO Global Cloud Exchange and CEO of Reliance Communications during Datacloud Asia 2017 in Singapore.

Entrepreneur’s Space X agency files request for $10bn project with the FCC and says internet speeds globally will reach 1Gb/s.

The man who wants to take humans to Mars also wants to connect the whole of planet Earth and bring digital equality across the globe.

Elon Musk’s Space X spacial agency has requested to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorisation to launch 4,425 satellites which would be used to provide connectivity to the more than 7.2 billion humans on Earth.

In comparison, today there are ‘only’ 1,420 working satellites and an additional 2,600 defunct satellites. Together, working and offline satellites would not be enough to match Musk’s ambitions.

The new service provided by the thousands of satellites has an estimated cost of “at least” $10bn and would start with the launch of 800 satellites which would cover the US, including Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

In the filing, Space X said: “The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, government and professional users worldwide.”

As for the human population, today only 43% is connected to the internet, with more than 3.5 billion people yet to be brought online. According to the document filed, the internet speed offered by the new world internet would reach 1 Gb/s, much faster than today’s global average of 5,6 Mb/s.

The world’s fastest internet is currently available in South Korea with an average national speed of up to 28,7 Mb/s, according to US-based CDN and cloud provider Akamai. “Once fully deployed, the SpaceX System will pass over virtually all parts of the Earth’s surface and therefore, in principle, have the ability to provide ubiquitous global service,” it reads on the filled document.

Each satellite has been designed to nearly match the size of an average car. They would measure four meters by 1.8 and by 1.2 with a total weigh of 386kg. The satellites would orbit Earth at an altitude between 1,150 Km and 1,275 Km. In the race to connect the planet, Space X is already facing competition from other players such as Boeing Aerospace and OneWeb – a venture backed by Airbus, Virgin, Bharti, and Qualcomm – each one planning to launch 1,000 satellites. The use of satellites to provide internet connectivity on Earth could prove challenging to broadband providers using fiber and other cabling solutions.

WORLD

EMEA

The speed at which innovation is disruption markets across the globe is faster than anyone has ever predicted and data centres are having to adapt while managing the associated challenges and overcome barriers to serve the global digital economy.

Taking to the stage, Barney labelled today as one of the most interesting phases in history in terms of cloud adoption.

This is because the landscape of who is using the cloud has dramatically shifted over the last 12 months.

He said: “Software has changed, hardware has changed, infrastructure has changed, the network has changed. All this has allowed big data to come in. What is enabling this is the cloud, and data centre operators are behind this. Anyone in the hosting space will tell you this is the golden age for data centres.”

This golden age is evolving and the opportunities for providers that know how to reap the benefits from such revolution will be huge. By 2020, the number of connected devices is expected to top 50 billion, the number of connected people four billion and the IoT is predicted to account for up to 3% of the world’s power consumption, according to Gartner.

This will drive not only a $5tr economy but also a large demand for cloud services, and consequently, data centres.

The disruptive opportunities here are set to change everything as we know it starting with the infrastructure which will become more orchestrated and split into larger, medium and smaller facilities to keep the connected world functioning 24/7.

Barney said: “The networked data centre will be at the core of the future. Distributed focused compute centres will be the wave of the future.

“Orchestration is at the core. Data centres are not just about connectivity and the space. It is about having the whole ecosystem in place, have the network in place, orchestration facilities and IoT services.”

Barney has also touched upon the large opportunities in emerging markets across the globe, especially in Africa and Asia.

He said: “Whoever can make the emerging markets their home will have an unprecedented advantage with huge demand ahead.

“Innovating and expanding across emerging markets will reap biggest benefits for the cloud as requirements growth.

“Most of the world’s population in the world is underserved; the emerging markets are high growth and underserves. 75% of world’s population is in emerging markets and data centre owners will be big winners in the next decade.”

Another factor weighing into the equation is the fact that no emerging market has a clear data centre leader as the large colocation providers are all grouped in North America and Europe.

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

6

JANUARY 2018

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS to lead $390BN cloud economy February 2017

Sale of 15 facilities comes amid strong consolidation and expansion activity across the North American and APAC regions.

Today, the market has matured and despite security remaining as a concern, most enterprises, either large or small, are using the cloud.

Bain points out that of the Fortune Global 50 companies, 48 have publicly announced cloud adoption plans, many of which use the cloud for a broad swath of their IT environments.

Global cloud IT market revenues are set to more than double by 2020 with both public and private cloud hardware, software and services set to generate $390bn in revenues by the end of this decade.

Where’s business coming from in 2017/18?

According to Bain & Company’s “The Changing Faces of the Cloud” report, market revenues accounted to ‘only’ $180bn in 2015 and are now set to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17% until 2020.

Of the $390bn estimated cloud market, public cloud services are set to represent the largest part of the sector, with Software as a Service (SaaS) predicted to grow at a CAGR of 18%. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are tipped for a 27% CAGR. Public cloud infrastructure and enabling services are predicted to increase at a 12% CAGR while private cloud services, including managed private clouds (MPC) and dedicated private clouds (DPC), are predicted to grow at a 25% CAGR. The CAGR for private cloud infrastructure and enabling services has been set at 15%.

The drive behind such growth comes as the industry has seen a shift in the last five years from a state of mind where cloud was mostly seen as a tool for startups that posed more questions around security than the ones it answered.

WORLD

EMEA

For the first time ever, ‘slow-and-steady’ customers will account for the largest share of cloud spending which is estimated to top $165bn in 2018.

“These customers, for a range of reasons, were not yet ready to adopt cloud computing in a meaningful way,” Bain explains.

Slow-and-steady customers will be followed by ‘safety-conscious’, ‘transformational, ‘heterogeneous’ and ‘price-conscious’ customers.

Analysts said: “The demand for cloud computing services has shifted from a small number of transformational customers to later adopters coming off the sidelines.

“More than ever, technology providers need to take a step back and re-evaluate whether they are set up for success in this next wave of cloud computing.”

Bain has also shared three advices for cloud providers. These include: invest to win big in a focused set of cloud battlegrounds, target the customer segments that best fit with your assets and capabilities, and reassess your offers, go-to-market model, organisation and people, processes, incentives and systems for the next wave of cloud computing.

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

7

JANUARY 2018

Google’s cloud CAPEX hits $30bn with more to come as giant plans 10 new data centres March 2017

And Snap is also set to help boost data centre investment as company has $2bn cloud contract with Google to use its cloud data centres.

Google’s cloud empire has cost the American giant $30bn over the years, nearly double of what Microsoft has invested in its Azure cloud infrastructure. The figure was unveiled by Google’s parent company Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt while taking to the stage at the provider’s annual conference Google Cloud Next held in San Francisco. He said: “We put $30bn into this platform.

I know this because I approved it.”

As the company tries to catch up with Microsoft and especially AWS in terms of market share and revenues, a $30bn capital expenditure comes at no surprise. Google is in direct competition with not only Microsoft and AWS, the world’s public cloud leader, but also IBM and Salesforce.

The agreement signed on January 30, 2017, between Google and Snap includes the purchase of cloud services worth $400m for a period of five years. Despite Snap’s deal with Google, the company has also a $1bn contract with AWS. Yet, Google has won this customer over AWS and is set to invest more to secure one of its largest cloud customers by building out its infrastructure.

According to the most recent data by Synergy Research Group, AWS was in Q4 of 2016 the public cloud leader with more than 40% of worldwide revenues. Microsoft is believed to be second, while Google and IBM keep fighting for the third place.

Moreover, it is relevant to mention the investment Google is making towards powering its data centres with renewable energy.

Looking at the wider market, Google is not alone in regards to expansion plans. Also Microsoft and AWS have in the past few months announced intense growth roadmaps.

But can Google catch up? The company has today more than 20 cloud regions and operates 15 data centres, including eight in the US, one in Chile, four in Europe (Ireland, the Netherlands, Finland and Belgium) and two in Asia, in Taiwan and Singapore.

In 2016 Google’s overall CAPEX was higher than the preceding year amounting to $10.9bn, compared to $9.9bn in 2015.

In AWS’ case, the web scale player operates 16 data centres across all continents except for Africa, accounting to 42 availability zones.

The company is also the only public cloud provider to have a data centre – comprising two zones of service- fully dedicated to the US government. Public plans announced by AWS include new regions in Paris, France, and Ningxia, China, where the company is already present in Beijing.

Although the full amount was not solely directed towards the construction of data centres and direct cloud investments, the company’s CFO Ruth Porat said most of the investment went into building out the company’s cloud footprint. The full year CAPEX followed from the company’s commitment towards investing in the cloud announced by Google’s SVP Diane Greene, precisely one year ago at Google Cloud Next 2015.

As for Microsoft, the company is the one out of the big three with more cloud data centre buildings at 31 facilities powering Azure in the US, Canada, Brazil, UK, Ireland, Germany, India, Australia, China, Japan, North Korea and more. The company is currently building two data centres in France.

She said at the time: “We are dead serious about this business.

We are going to put them to work as much as we can.”

Last week, the world got a better idea of what Google is planning next as the company unveiled plans to open more data centres in Canada, the US and Europe. This follows from data centres which are expected to come online in the coming months in São Paulo (Brazil), Finland, Frankfurt (Germany), London (UK), Mumbai (India), Singapore and Sydney (Australia). There are also reports that Google is planning to mimic Facebook and open a data centre in Sweden.

Moreover, helping Google’s case is a $2bn cloud contract with Snap, owner of social media app Snapchat. The contract was unveiled by company filings put forward for an IPO that took place last week on Nasdaq.

WORLD

EMEA

John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group, said: “While a few cloud providers are growing at extraordinary rates, AWS continues to impress as a dominant market leader that has no intention of letting its crown slip.

“Achieving and maintaining a leadership position in this market takes huge ongoing investments in infrastructure, a continued expansion in the range of cloud services offered, strong credibility with the large enterprise sector, consistently strong execution, and the wholehearted and long-term backing of senior management.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

8

JANUARY 2018

ISIS cyberterrorist attack on data centres a real threat April 2017

Recent warnings surrounding nuclear plants, power stations and airports spark fears that data centres could also become a sought-after target for terrorists.

Data centres could become the next target for terrorist organisations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) which may have already developed enough intelligence to penetrate critical infrastructure.

“As applications are being built on distributed cloud APIs, big data analytics services, sensor aggregation and cloud surveillance platforms served through the cloud, data centres are more likely to become a target for cyber terrorists, such as ISIS,” Pascal Geenens, Radware EMEA security evangelist, told Data Economy.

Concerns surrounding ISIS cyber-attacks against critical infrastructure led in recent days British security services to issue a warning to UK-based nuclear plants, airports and power stations to up their defences as fears that terrorists have developed enough technology to bypass electronic security systems mount.

Germany authorities have also recently raised the country’s cyber security alert levels to heightened readiness. In the data centre space that fear is also being felt due to the critical importance that facilities cater in an ever more digitised world.

Growing threat level The threat surrounding data centres cyberspace is not new, however, only recently stakes have been raised considerably.

The “2016 Ponemon Institute Cost of Data Centre Outages” study, commissioned by Vertiv, has found that in 2016, 22% of data centre outages were caused by cyberattacks, up from 18% in 2013. Cybercrime was that year labelled as one of the fastest growing concerns surrounding data centre downtime.

Failing to have the right cyber strategy in place could also prove costly as financial damages associated with downtime have also soared in recent years.

According to the same study, the average cost of a data centre outage in 2016 was $740,357, up from $505,502 in 2010.

Geenens said: “An effective security strategy should assess the risk and establish an adequate protection based on that risk profile. In general, I would argue that since October 2016 an effective DDoS protection should be part of any security strategy going forward, based on the evolved threat landscape and the economy of DDoS attacks.

“DDoS attacks have a fairly low upfront investment thanks to IoT botnets and are very lucrative for hackers either as DDoS-for-hire or with ransom DDoS.

He said: “Paramount to this goal is the continued adoption of Layer 3 routing, which can enable segregation of traffic and the implementation of granular security rules when interconnecting.

“The latter function is particularly important, as it would prevent hackers from breaching beyond a router’s subnet, thus removing the vulnerability of sensitive data.”

Human errors can grant terrorists access In addition to the DDoS and Layer 3 routing security, data centre operators have also been advised to minimise the impact of human errors in the data centre which count for most outages and problems in the space, several reports have found over the years.

According to Josh Yavor, Director of Corporate Security at Duo Security, despite all the advances in security, attackers know that they can always rely on human error to gain access to critical data.“Phishing is proven to be effective, which is why it is used almost exclusively by attackers as the primary point of entry to gain an initial foothold.

“Companies who use traditional collocated or wholly-owned data centres often have increased network access to data centrebased systems such as the CDU/PDUs (Current/Power Distribution Units – basically “smart” power strips that can provide control and metrics) and other Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) such as generators and fire suppression systems.”

Ravid Circus, VP of Products at Skybox Security, said that for many in cybersecurity including data centre operators, the state of cybersecurity is “a bit like a Second World War movie”.

“Cybersecurity teams see the damage but too often lack visibility into what they are trying to protect, their most pressing risks and the security tools at their disposal,” he said.

“Security teams function operate in constant reactionary mode, while a strategic, proactive security program remains elusive.”

“Ransom DDoS pretty much puts a target on anyone with an online presence, there is no discrimination or special interest groups; when you are unprotected you are a potential target.”

In the end, Radware’s Geenens also highlighted that the threat of a cyber terrorist attack is not just confined to the data centre industry.

Adding to this, Freeman said that to combat poor cyber terrorism security in the data centre, operators should continue to strengthen their IT infrastructures to secure all data in storage and in transit.

He said: “Online trading and financial institutions also provide likely platforms that directly impact the economy of a country, targeting these services provides leverage for terrorists.”

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

9

JANUARY 2018

Microsoft to add capacity at all its data centres in major cloud push against Google, AWS September 2017

We have also designed Availability Zones to give customers great confidence in delivering services and with an industry-leading, financially-backed 99.99% virtual machines uptime SLA when generally available.

Virginia and Amsterdam have already seen services boosted, with other 40 cloud regions to follow in the months away.

Microsoft has unveiled plans to add additional capacity at its data centres as the company intensifies its investment to catch up with AWS and Google.

“Availability Zones allow customers to run mission-critical applications with higher availability and fault tolerance to data centre failures. With 42 announced regions worldwide (more than any other cloud provider) and backed by one of the largest networks on the planet, Azure offers the scale needed to bring applications closer to users and customers around the world.

The additional capacity comes in the form of availability zones, described by the technology giant as fault-isolated locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking.

The first Availability Zones put to work are now in preview in two regions, East US 2 in Virginia and West Europe in the Netherlands, with plans to offer preview to additional regions in the US, Europe, and Asia before the end of the year including our Microsoft’s France Central region in Paris.

“With Azure’s geographic expansion, we invest in providing the best cloud experience possible including expanding and upgrading our global network.”

Tom Keane Head of Global Infrastructure, Microsoft Azure, said in a blog post: “Starting today, customers can begin using Azure Availability Zones in preview to build highly available applications.

“Availability Zones increase Azure’s resiliency capabilities and broaden options for customers to choose the business continuity solution that is right for their organization.

WORLD

EMEA

Microsoft’s cloud announcement comes shortly after the company’s cable Marea was completed.

The 6,600Km cable, built with Facebook and Telefonica, has a capacity of up to 160 terabits, and will be used to speed up traffic exchange between the US and Europe, and beyond into Asia and North Africa.

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

10

JANUARY 2018

EMEA Human error behind BAs ‘tragic’ data centre outage that grounded 75,000 passengers June 2017

With a bill that could reach £150m, British Airways is conducting an investigation into the event while facing critics from industry and insurance bodies.

computing systems and hardware throughout the years without the necessary retrofits.

Hours after the incident, the GMB union went as far as claiming that the IT problems happened after BA dismissed “hundreds of dedicated and loyal” IT staff to outsource its IT needs to India in a bid to save money.

One of history’s largest IT meltdowns in the aviation space has reportedly been triggered by human error. The “catastrophic” and “tragic” event at a British Airways’ (BA) data centre in Heathrow, London, occurred after a staff member switched off a power supply unit in “perfect working order”, according to The Times.

CEO Cruz has in the meantime come under fire and many have called for his resignation. Cruz has put down any idea of resigning from the role of CEO which he was appointed to in April 2016. Cruz said: “We do apologise profusely for the hardship that these customers of ours have had to go through. “We absolutely profusely apologise for that and we are absolutely committed to provide and abide by the compensation rules that are currently in place. “We are absolutely committed to finding the root causes of this particular event and we will make sure nothing like this happens to British Airways ever again.”

The paper reports that an investigation is under way and will likely focus on human error as the cause for the disturbance to the data centre. When switching off the unit power supply (UPS) and then running an uncontrolled reboot, the engineer caused “catastrophic physical damage” to the servers due to power overload. According to sources, the engineer works for CBRE Global Workplace Solutions.

The outage happened around 9:30am on Saturday, May 27, 2017, and is said to have lasted 15 minutes. However, its consequences were harshly felt by more than 75,000 passengers worldwide as 800 to 1,000 flights were cancelled. Earlier this week, Bill Francis, head of IT at International Airlines Group (IAG), BA’s parent company, sent an email to staff in which he mentioned the outage at the Heathrow data centre had not been cause by an IT failure or software related problems.

BA’s CEO Alex Cruz firstly blamed the outage on a power supply.

Days after IAG’s CEO Willie Walsh, also claimed that a power surge had brought down BA’s IT systems. In a statement, BA said: “There was a loss of power to the UK data centre which was compounded by the uncontrolled return of power which caused a power surge taking out our IT systems. So we know what happened we just need to find out why.

“It was not an IT failure and had nothing to do with outsourcing of IT, it was an electrical power supply which was interrupted. We are undertaking an exhaustive investigation to find out the exact circumstances and most importantly ensure that this can never happen again.”

However, energy supplier UK Power Networks, which provides power to the area where the data centre sits, disputed BA’s claims of a power outage saying that energy had not been interrupted. Such was followed by reports that maintenance at the data centre, built in 1980s, was poor and that the facility had been filled up with modern

WORLD

EMEA

Industry analysts have said the outage could cost BA as much as £150m in compensations and reimbursements to those affected.

The airliner is now battling with insurers on who is to blame for the incident. The Association of British Insurers (ABI) has already come out to say the company gave passengers the wrong information which has complicated the claims process. The ABI told the Financial Times: “Any cover available under travel insurance will usually kick in only if compensation is not available from any other source.

“Those affected should seek compensation, and any refunds of expenses, in the first instance from British Airways. People affected by the disruption should be able to claim compensation and refunds for any expenses as simply as possible, not being passed from pillar to post. EU flight compensation regulations set out that airline operators should provide compensation to passengers that suffer long delays or cancellations.”

UPDATED 15:45, 2 June, 2017 CBRE has spoken out denying the rumours that suggest human error to be behind the BA data centre downtime. The company manages the BA Boadicea House data centre, near Heathrow, and said the claims around what caused the outage were “not founded in fact”.

CBRE said: “We are the manager of the facility for our client BA and fully support its investigation. No determination has been made yet regarding the cause of this incident. Any speculation to the contrary is not founded in fact.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

11

JANUARY 2018

Norway lands ‘world’s largest’ data centre at 1,000MW, 6.5 million sqf April 2017

A giant data centre, which will be the “world’s largest”, is making its way to Ballangen, a Norwegian municipality of just over 2,600 inhabitants in the Nordic region. The project is being developed by Kolos and the data centre will be known as Kolos. Kolos, the group, is a Norwegian and American company with offices in Norway, the US and Europe.

The data centre is projected to initially draw in 70MW of power, and at full build will measure as much as 6.46 million sqf and have the ability to process 1,000 MW. Kolos has already conducted a series A capital funding round, partnered with HDR, and engineering and design company, and acquired the land to build the data centre.

Kolos founder and co-CEO Håvard Lillebo, said: “The plan is to build a large, cost-effective data centre that has access to cheap green energy.” Lillebo shares the board with San Francisco-based Mark Robinson, also founder and co-CEO of Kolos and VP of product management and business development for Innovation Norway & Executive in Residence.

New York-based Daniel Hodges, executive, sales, and marketing at Fortune 500 companies including Discovery, Nokia, and Associated Press and start-ups such as Enpocket and Verve, is acting as Kolos’ president. The data centre is designed to be powered using 100% renewable energy sourced from hydropower stations and wind farms.

Kolos’s specifications reveal that the data centre will operate at a 60% reduction in energy costs, “making it the most competitive data centre in the world,” the company claims.

The site will be cooled down using natural cooling based on the region’s cool climate and the development’s proximity to water.

Developers have also labelled the future data centre as a “fortress for data” as the site will be surrounded by water and hills, providing a natural moat to protect against any physical risks.

“Kolos will deploy the latest technology in data centre security, employing the most innovative engineers and technology experts, who will constantly monitor and manage new cyber-security risks,” the company has said. Building on from previous projects in the Nordic region, the data centre in Ballangen is being backed by a up to five local mayors.

Projectors estimate the new Kolos centre will directly create 2,000 to 3,000 jobs and support 10,000 to 15,000 jobs as a result of people moving to Ballangen. Knut Einar Hanssen, Counsel Representative for Ballangen, said: “The data centre could lead to many new jobs and have a great effect on the city of Ballangen and many positive changes for the local community. We must plan in advance.”

Deadly Amsterdam power outage knocks-down data centres January 2017

State of emergency declared in the capital; data centre provider reports trouble with getting all generators up and running; websites down. services and the other because the outage triggered her oxygen supply to shut down. Data centres also felt victim to the outage with colocation company The Data Centre Group (TDCG) reporting that its Amsterdam facility had to switch to backup functions. However, the operator was faced with a faulty A-feed which led to one of the data centre’s generators not to start automatically.

Large parts of Amsterdam were brought to a standstill on January 17 and two people died as a result of a power outage that brought parts of the city’s transport system down, left thousands of households without electricity and forced data centres to activate contingency plans.

Utility company Liander said the outage was originated by a “component failure” at a high tension power station in Hewmweg.

The cause of the failure is still unknown. Power went out at 04:19am, leaving 364,000 homes in and around the capital, including Amsterdam city centre, without energy.

Services were only fully restored by 9am, forcing the police to send out all its force to the streets while it was pitch dark, according to the NL Times. According to Euronews, the state of emergency was declared as a precaution during the outage. Trains, metro systems and trams were also heavily disrupted and certain hospitals had to cancel surgeries for the day, universities were shutdown as well as several schools across the city.

According to the Relegraaf, two elderly people died during the outage.One 83-year-old because it could not reach the emergency

WORLD

EMEA

Data Economy reached out to other data centre players in Amsterdam, including Interxion, Equinix, Digital Realty and Switch Datacentres. A Switch Datacentres spokesperson said: “We did not have any issue with the power outage in Amsterdam. An Equinix spokesperson also told Data Economy: “On January 17 there was a utility disruption in Amsterdam which resulted in Equinix’s AM8 IBX data centre going onto generator power, however no customers were impacted by this incident.”

Hans Grünfeld, MD at VEMW (the Dutch Association for Energy, Environment and Water), said: “This is the second major outage in the region within a period of two years with great harm to citizens and businesses and a disruptive effect on the economy and everyday life.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

12

JANUARY 2018

‘Cash constraints’ throw UK cloud data centre business into administration, business for sale August 2017

UK’s largest data centre campus tops £68m in funding February 2017

New hub just outside London is now fully funded. First of four data centres, comprising 16 data halls in total, to be launched in 2017.

KAO Data Campus, a new £200m, 35-acre science and technology data centre campus located on the LondonStansted-Cambridge corridor, has raised an extra £33m through a second funding round led by Downing LLP and managed by Goldacre Ventures.

With the new round, the final one before the first of four data centres is put to work, KAO Data Campus has topped £68m in raised debt and equity and is now fully funded. The equity has been raised from existing investors.

“Business remained loss making and is not viable in its current form,” administrators say as they begin assessment works to find root cause of cash constraints. Administrators have walked into Manchester-based data centre and cloud company DataCentred after the company failed to generate enough cash flow to sustain the current business roadmap.

FRP Advisory has been tasked with assessing the company’s situation and selling the business which today employs 15 staff.

Based in Media City, Salford, DataCentred, has traded for four years, operating both a physical data centre and cloud business.

The company provides software-defined and cloud-native infrastructure services in the form of public and private clouds.

The cloud operator is to continue to trade whilst assessment works are carried out on its financials and restructuring options are explored.

Former EUDCA’s board member and industry expert Derek Webster, said the fact DataCentred has been put into administration, does not mean this is an industry trend for the UK. “It could just be a company that has not obtained the market volumes to meet tits growth plans,” he said. Webster continued: “The UK is such a competitive place. The way we do things in the UK is more competitive than other places around the world.

“We have seen some big activity in the M&A market and I think this actually makes it more difficult for new comers to establish themselves in this space. Unless you are well established, with a strong balance sheet, with a good market offer and market proposition, I think it is more difficult for new entrants to enter the market place unless you are doing something disruptive or at scale.”

He also said that generally, after four years of operation any company has to look at deploying something disruptive, offer segment focused SLAs, or they will be to catch the local markets.

Webster said: “The Manchester scene is quite busy, and is a vibrant scene. Most of these things [administrations] are about sales volumes meeting balance sheet expectations. If you look at some of the new entrants in the market, they have to do something very disruptive or have higher certainty sales pipelines meeting market/ segment need.

“To be a cloud provider with one site can be a bit niche. Normally, you would build your local market, bring your revenues in and then expand your market into cloud. “If you have one site and you are in the cloud business that means you may need to be cutting data backup and resilience deals with other providers undermining your own margin.”

WORLD

EMEA

Tom Phillips, Investment Director at Downing, said: “We believe that the site has clear potential and look forward to KAO becoming an important operator within the UK data centre market over the coming years.” Downing’s investment in KAO is the organisation’s fourth investment into the data centre sector in recent years. The investment manager company has more than £700m of assets currently under management.

KAO Data Campus will include four data centres each split into four halls and designed over three floors, totalling around 150,000 sqf of net technical space. Each technology suite will be capable of supporting a 2,175kW IT load totalling an 8.7MW IT load across each building. Infrastructure work across the site is part-funded by Harlow Council and HCA. David Bloom, CEO of management boutique Goldacre Ventures said: “This latest raise represents an important milestone in the KAO Data Campus development project, emphasising a continuing commitment by investors into the UK’s technical infrastructure regardless of the current political uncertainty.”

KAO Park is the first part of the Harlow Enterprise Zone, one of 24 Enterprise Zones across England created by Government to stimulate business growth through offering tax and planning incentives as well as infrastructure development. The data centre at KAO Park, KAO Data Campus, will be one of the UK’s largest data centre campuses when it comes online later this year.

The Harlow Enterprise Zone comprises two more developments in addition to KAO Park. This includes London Road North which will see the development of a new 25-acre Science Park on a greenfield site owned by Harlow Council, and Templefields, a long term re-development of an existing industrial estate into a modern business park.

Jan Daan Luycks, MD at KAO Data Campus, told Data Economy: “The discovery of fibre optic cable technology on this site 50 years ago, has been fundamental to the UK’s economic development. “The current renaissance of KAO Data Campus encapsulates this history and reaffirms the importance of the UK’s position as a global business hub, as well as its pledge to scientific and technological excellence.”

Power utility contractor Matrix Networks has been tasked with delivering the UKPN adoptable 33kV/11kV 43.5MVA sub-station providing capacity to support the whole Campus.

The sub-station is due for completion April 2017, with practical completion for the first data centre scheduled for the end of 2017.

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

13

JANUARY 2018

Brexit countdown. $2bn data centre operator acquires rival’s London facility March 2017

Plans for further expansion due to open in Q3 2017 have also been laid out.

European data centre services provider Zenium has completed the acquisition of Infinity’s Stockley Park data centre in London expanding its fleet to six facilities across the continent.

Zenium, which has in the last 15 years raised over $2bn, has now become the sole owner of the facility which has now been named London Two. The move comes seven days before the UK government officially triggers Article 50 kicking off the official Brexit negotiations with the EU which will result in the country leaving the union.

London Two has 13.62 MW of IT load and 7,135 sqm of technical space across two floors with Active / Active 11 kV dual redundant power supplies.

“We operate in a fast-moving environment so we need to be agile. We invest a lot of time in this space talking to partners, consultants, competitors and other data centre experts, in order to share learnings.

Cooling of the facility is done through the use of chillers and adiabatic cooling systems.

Zenium said it will continue to support the existing global telecoms tenant currently colocated on the ground floor, whilst further space to be built will provide 4,016 sqm of technical space with 9.32 MW of IT load on the first floor.

The new data space will be available in Q3 2017. No financials related to the deal have been disclosed.

Franek Sodzawiczny, Founder and CEO at Zenium, said: “The key to staying at the forefront of any sector is to be able to move quickly; responding effectively to business opportunities that arise. This is exactly what we have done here.

“Most importantly this also enables us to make the right decisions to propel us forward. We see the UK as an important market and will continue to build our data centre portfolio here as and when the right opportunities are identified.”

Zenium’s has over 15 years designed and delivered over 400,000 sqm of raised floor space.

Its portfolio tops 28,435 sqm of technical space and currently includes a data centre campus comprising three facilities in Istanbul, one data centre in Frankfurt and two data centres in London.

Interxion sets date for opening of third Irish data centre February 2017

Operator builds on strong demand from market thirsty for colocation services driven by the rapid adoption of digital technologies. One of Europe’s largest data centre providers, Interxion, is carrying out the final preparations for the launch of its newest facility in EMEA. In an invite sent to the press, customers and partners, the company has unveiled that it will officially cut the ribbon of its new Dublin data centre on March 3. The DUB3 data centre will be the company’s third facility in the Irish capital.

Tanya Duncan, Managing Director of Interxion Ireland, stated: “We are very excited about the launch of DUB3, Interxion’s third data centre in Ireland which will officially launch in early March. “When fully constructed, DUB3 will provide a total of approximately 2,300 sqm of equipped space.”

According to the company’s website, the facility will measure 24,972 sqf “in phase one”, suggesting the site is set for further

WORLD

EMEA

expansion. Available renders of the project (pictured above), show that a piece of land of marginally around the same size as the area covered by phase one is available for further potential build outs.

In terms of power, Interxion has designed the facility to count with 2kw/sqm, making a total IT load of 4.64MW. Duncan said: “Even in the wake of Brexit, Ireland is still expected to continue as one of Europe’s fastest growing economies.

“Over the past number of years, at Interxion we have seen demand increase year on year for our services, from both our current clients and for new entrants to the Irish and European market. “These companies know they can trust a brand like Interxion to deliver connectivity and security for to meet their needs.”

In addition to the data centres in Ireland, Interxion also runs facilities in the UK, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Austria and Sweden.

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

14

JANUARY 2018

AWS will open data centres in South Africa July 2017

Company currently operates 43 availability zones across the globe, with 16 active regions and several more planned to come into operation soon.

Real estate fund to build 420,000 sqf data centre in Frankfurt March 2017

The world’s fastest growing public cloud provider AWS has spoken out for the first time on the possibility of launching data centres in South Africa. The intention to build its own infrastructure in the continent was unveiled by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels while speaking to Business Live.

The executive said the company is currently working on understanding the region’s demand, not only in South Africa, but across the whole of the region. However, Werner did not give away any dates for when the data centres would be built.

He said: “We have a lot of customers here already, especially when it comes to young business, (…) but also larger companies, before opening up a region here.” AWS has today 43 operational availability zones across 16 regions where data centres power its cloud services.

The company has announced plans to open 11 new availability zones in the coming years, as well as four new regions. However, none of the announced regions concern Africa.

AWS’ intention to build infrastructure in the most southern country of the African continent follows on from Microsoft’s announcement back in May when the Azure giant announced it will be opening in 2018 two data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

JLL acted as adviser during the land acquisition process.

Building will count with a minimum power supply of 35 MVA. A private real estate fund has acquired a 280,000 sqf pieceof-land in East Frankfurt with the intention to build one of the largest data centres within the Frankfurt metro areal.

The data centre building will have a gross floor area of nearly 420,000 sqf with a minimum power supply of 35 MVA, diversely routed to site.

Technical space will account to 172,222 sqf utilising an average floor power density of 1.5 kW/sqm.

According to sources, the fund has started a number of discussions which are “well progressed”, with a view to the building being fully pre-committed prior to commencing construction.

The scheme will purposely be delivered to a powered shell specification, to enable any occupier to construct a bespoke M&E solution, to meet their or their clients’ requirements.

The fund have undertaken a detailed M&E concept design, advised by Deerns, which has been used for planning purposes.

As the building will be finished to a powered shell condition, the building can cater for higher power densities and further power is available from German energy supplier Mainova upon application.

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

15

JANUARY 2018

Capita data centre outage throws UK councils into chaos May 2017

Telehouse now offering verisign DDoS protection services July 2017

Telehouse, a leading global data centre provider, today announced that it is now offering Verisign’s Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection Services to Telehouse customers through a reseller relationship with Telehouse’s parent company KDDI. The services will assist Telehouse’s finance and enterprise customers, internet service, cloud and content service providers that comprise the Telehouse Interconnect, to protect their most critical assets and reduce the risk of DDoS attacks. The services detect and filter malicious traffic aimed at disrupting or disabling internet-based services.

Some clients have had services disrupted for nearly 42 hours due to a power failure.

The Verisign DDoS Protection Services are a cloud-based DDoS solution that can be deployed quickly and easily, ensuring comprehensive protection against network and application layer attacks. These services will provide Telehouse customers with protection against Layer 3, 4 and 7 attacks.

An outage at one of Capita’s data centres has brought down services of several customers in the UK and Ireland, including some UK Councils and the National Health Service (NHS) Business Services Authority.

Verisign’s OpenHybrid™ architecture allows organisations to seamlessly integrate their existing on-premise devices and cloud based platforms with the Verisign DDoS Protection Service, for faster detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks.

The outage started on Wednesday, May 24, at around 22:30, with services being affected for at least 42 hours in some cases.

According to a report by the Ponemon Institute, the average cost for DDoS attacks is $4.7million in 2016. Attacks continue to be unpredictable, persistent and vary widely in terms of volume, speed and complexity, according to Verisign’s Q1 2017 DDoS Trends Report.

The incident has affected customers also in Ireland using the Capita Pay360 service, designed for online transactions.

According to a disruption warning placed on Sheffield’s City Council website – which was still online at the time of publishing – the outage was due to a power failure.

“An off-site power failure is still causing problems for customers trying to contact us,” it reads.

A Capita spokesman said: “Due to a technical fault in one of our data centres, some clients are experiencing some issues with the availability of their IT services. As soon as the fault occurred, remedial work commenced. Services are now being restored with many now available.

This report also states that though there has been a decrease in the number of DDoS attacks compared to Q4 2016, Q1 2017 had a 26% increase in average peak attack size of DDoS attacks mitigated by Verisign.

Ken Sakai, Managing Director of Telehouse Europe stated, “the Verisign DDoS Protection Service further enhances the range of solutions and value Telehouse offers its customers, giving them the assurance that our data centres provide them with a secure and highly connected environment to house their IT infrastructure”.

“The remainder of services are now being robustly tested to enable them to be running as usual shortly.”

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

16

JANUARY 2018

‘Avoid UK completely, go directly to New York’: new Brexit subsea cable to link EU-US February 2017

in the U.K. Brexit will not impact any future builds to the UK. The UK is still well served by the infrastructure installed during the .com bubble. although it is getting a bit long in the tooth now.

Further connectivity to be enhanced in Asia with SingaporeMumbai cable that aims to fight “atrocious access charges”.

A new transatlantic cable which avoids the UK has been announced between Europe and the US as the “chaos around Brexit” grows.

“London will continue as global financial centre after Brexit, and new infrastructure will be built when it is demanded. Indeed Brexit should be seen as an opportunity to de-shackle the UK from Euro legislation to encourage more content players , data centre builders etc to base themselves in the UK and drive new cable builds to the UK.”

Named Brexit-1, the cable will link Marseille, France, to New York, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. The project was announced by telecoms expert and entrepreneurs Sunil Tagare, who first developed the concept of the a fiber-optic link around the globe (FLAG) back in 1989. Owned by the Global Cloud Xchange, today FLAG extends to 28,000 Km.

Elsewhere, in addition to the European-American cabling system, Tagare also announced a second cable that will connect Tuas in Singapore to Mumbai, India. Named Sing-India-Sing, the cable will land in an open cable station in Mumbai where the Reference Interconnection Offer (RIO) charges will be zero and any carrier will be able to access the CLS without any prejudice.

Tagare announced the project on LinkedIn and explained that Brexit-1 will “be a submarine cable connecting more than a dozen cables landing in Marseilles from the Middle East, India and Asia to New York bypassing the United Kingdom”.

The entrepreneur claims the cable will be safer and more reliable than other trans-European solutions as it is a direct cable without points-of-presence (POP). Tagare has also said the cable will be the lowest latency infrastructure deployed between Marseille and New York. Talking about Brexit, Tagare said: “With the chaos around Brexit, it is virtually impossible to know how it will shake out over the next few years. The best bet right now, is to avoid UK completely and go directly to New York.”

Tagare’s announcement around the Brexit-1 cable was met with mixed reactions from industry professionals. Reacting to the announcement on LinkedIn, industry professionals questioned the higher reliability of Brexit-1 over other terrestrial routes between Marseille and cable landing stations on the Atlantic. As for Brexit, experts highlighted that most major cables announced recently have also avoided the UK, however, not due to Brexit but due to the lack of content providers’ data centres in the country.

Peter Jamieson, who serves as chairman of the European Subsea Cable Association and principal engineer for the Virgin Media core fiber optic network, commented on a personal level: “It is not just this cable, every future Trans-Atlantic cable recently installed or planned within the next five years (except Hibernia Express, which goes to the UK but also has a branch to Eire) is avoiding the UK. “But it has nothing to do with Brexit, the new systems are being driven by the content guys and they do not have any data centres

WORLD

EMEA

RIO is an offer document setting out matters relating to the price, and terms and conditions, under which a carrier permits the interconnection of another carrier to its network. According to Tagare, such regulations enable carriers to charge “atrocious access charges”.

The cable will be connected to Open India, an internet exchange with several local carriers. Tagare said the cable will only sell full fiber pairs and that customers will be able to manage their own equipment and upgrade as and when they want.

“It is quite possible you may not need a full fiber pair to India right now but if the price you are paying for a full fiber pair is equivalent to a handful of 100G circuits today, what difference does it make? The minimum speed per fiber pair will be 10 Tbps,” he said.

Similarly to Brexit-1, Sing-India-Sing will not have any POPs. Tagare said: “I am a huge supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of a Digital India and my goal is very simple — to make India one of the most important hubs of bandwidth in the world.

“Once the Open India CLS initiative starts working, I can contemplate several new cables landing in that station — free from the arcane RIO regulations. “The time has come for an Open India solution to the access issues. Every Indian carrier as well as foreign companies will benefit significantly. “The Government of India is fully supportive of this initiative which will bring down the RIO costs to zero.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

17

JANUARY 2018

Amsterdam beats Frankfurt, Paris and Dublin to be mainland Europe’s largest colocation data centre hub October 2017

Amsterdam has become EMEA’s second largest colocation data centre hotspot in with a 22% market share after overtaking Frankfurt in Q3 2017. With only London sitting ahead, Amsterdam has had a flow of new stock coming online this year which has propelled the size of the market when measured by IT power, according to JLL’s EMEA Data Centres Q3 2017 Market Review.

According to the report, at the end of Q3, Amsterdam had a total power supply of 292MW, compared to Frankfurt’s 251MW, which represented 19% of the market. Paris (14%) and Dublin (9%) had 180MW and 97MW respectively.

Including JLL’s projections for the remainder of the year, the think tank expects Amsterdam to continue ahead of any other mainland topTier destination with a projected 295MW, a 47% compared to 2016.

Frankfurt comes second in terms of CAGR at 23%, and is expected to reach 260MW, followed by Dublin with a projected CAGR for 2017 versus 2017 at 16%, growing towards the 98MW, and Paris’s is expected to grow 13% to 185MW. As for London, however the British capital continues to be EMEA’s main data centre destination, the city is only expected to grow 9% to 495MW.

Only London’s total supply is able to exceed Amsterdam at 488MW and with 38% of the market share. However, Amsterdam has for the first three quarters of the year been the capital that most supply has added at 56MW. This is followed by Frankfurt with 41MW, London with 26MW, Dublin with 19MW and Paris with 15MW.

Equinix proves Brexit wrong with acquisition of British data centre hub February 2017

Increasing data traffic in the UK and need for interconnections leads to investment to facilitate the movement of data worldwide.

Equinix’s fierce expansion plans led the company to buy a data centre in London, the eight in the British capital, as demand for digital infrastructure connectivity continues to increase despite Brexit.

The facility located in Slough was purchased from IO UK who had opened the data centre less than two years ago, in June 2015. The data centre will be renamed LD10 and will join three other Equinix data centres in Slough (LD4, LD5 and LD6). Financial details have not been disclosed.

The data centre sits in a piece-of-land measuring 4.91 aces. The shell has a total floor area of 112,000 sqf of which 43,670 sqf are being used as colocation space. The remaining space corresponds to offices (12,805 sqf) and other areas as well as space for further expansion of the server halls.

The IT load reaches up to 9.6 MW and cooling is done though air cooled chillers. The facility adds approximately 350 cabinets of sold capacity to Equinix’s portfolio and a total colocation space of approximately 3,340 cabinets once the facility is completely built out. For the period to December 31, 2015, which is the last fully reported financial period, IO UK generated revenues of approximately $1.4m.

The acquisition agreement was signed on January 7, 2017 and the acquisition was completed on February 3, 2017. The Slough campus has a latency of 30 milliseconds to New York and 4 milliseconds to Frankfurt. Equinix said the hub will help to address growing market demand in the UK and the EMEA region. According to TechUK, the UK accounts for 11.5% of global cross-border data flows in 2015, compared with 3.9% of global GDP and 0.9% of global population.

Cross-border data flows for the UK increased 28 times between 2005 and 2015 and are expected to grow another 5 times through

WORLD

EMEA

2021. With this transaction Equinix now operates 147 IBX data centres in 40 markets. This will soon top over 175 facilities in 43 markets once the $3.6bn acquisition of Verizon’s data centres in the Americas is finalised.

Eric Schwartz, EMEA president of Equinix, said: “London remains a global economic engine, with leading enterprises and cloud service providers making it a primary hub for IT infrastructure. “Adding additional interconnection and capacity in this market enables local and international customers to leverage Platform Equinix to meet their changing business needs – whether that is to connect to networks, clouds, or financial markets – Equinix is the place to be.”

James Maudslay, global head for insurance at Equinix, said the “Equinix empire” focus for 2017 is about showing the concept of interconnection, explaining the edge, the IoT, and other trends impacting the market. He said: “We started about 18/24 months ago, to look much more directly at the concept of interconnection.

The company has always been about connecting partners together.

“Originally it was the fiber networks in the US and elsewhere to connect them together so they could pass data between them.

“Then it matured to other things and especially in the financial services and foreign exchange markets where we have this very substantial system in London, New York and Tokyo, for example.”

He said that what has happened is that the “advent of new types of technologies such as the cloud” has meant that people had to refocus what they can do with these things. “As a result, which we are looking very heavily at this concept of interconnection, or what we have called, the interconnection oriented architecture.

“The idea of that being a fundamental in the digital age which we believe we are heading to very quickly.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

18

JANUARY 2018

Keppel invests over $100m in Dublin data centre expansion September 2017

Acquisition puts Keppel DC REIT’s assets under management at approximately $1.53bn with 917,240 sq ft of lettable area across 13 data centres.

Oslo hyperscale data centre site lands 45mw blockchain contract August 2017

Keppel DC REIT has acquired its second data centre presence in the Irish capital for a sum of $101.3m.

Named B10 Data Centre, the asset sits 12 kilometres from Dublin’s city centre and has been described as a carrier-neutral colocation data centre with a weighted average lease expiry (WALE) of approximately 11.0 years by net lettable area.

The data centre located within the Ballycoolin Business and Technology Park is currently 87.3% leased to global internet enterprise, IT services and telecommunications clients.

The hub started operations in 2013 and offers approximately 25,200 sq ft of lettable area.

Keppel DC REIT said the acquisition is immediately accretive to Keppel DC REIT’s Distribution per Unit (DPU).

It also added that the addition of the new facility will further diversify the REIT’s income stream, while its portfolio WALE remains long at approximately 9.4 years.

With the acquisition, assets under management of Keppel DC REIT have increased to approximately $1.53bn with aggregate lettable area of approximately 917,240 sq ft across 13 data centres.

Chua Hsien Yang, CEO of Keppel DC REIT Management Pte. Ltd., said: “This asset is a strategic addition to Keppel DC REIT’s portfolio given its strong tenant profile with a long WALE that provides income stability.

Site sits on a piece of flat land of 100 hectares and has a potential maximum capacity of 300 MW of renewable energy power.

Oslo Data Centre Location has signed Crypto One as a user of the large data centre development in the Oslo region, Norway, as the “rapidly growing blockchain economy” defies traditional financal services IT infrastructures.

CryptoOne is to start its deployment with on the data centre land with 1.5MW in a modular pilot centre.

“Apart from enhancing its offering in a key data centre hub, the REIT will be able to reap operational synergies from its existing data centre, Keppel DC Dublin 1.”

The pilot phase will last from three to six months and following its successful completion CryptoOne is expected to grow its footprint at the site in the Oslo Region to 30-45MW.

Keppel DC REIT’s investment follows on from a booming data centre industry across Ireland and especially Dublin.

Oslo Data Centre Location is a regional initiative that commercialises land for data centre developments and sits on a piece of flat land with 100 hectares and has a potential maximum capacity of 300 MW of renewable energy power.

The region has seen not only builds and acquisitions from colocation players but also from hyperscalers including Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple.

Consulting firm BroadGroup had previously cited Ireland as the most attractive location in Europe for data centres, noting the entry of hyperscale and large-scale data centre players around Dublin.

The company is currently conducting the zoning plan for the Greenfield on which the data centre will be built. Final political assessment is expected for fall 2017.

Oslo Data Centre Location is one of Invest In Norway’s selected data centre sites for international development.

Crypto One CEO Kristian Osestad, said: “In global competition, Oslo DCLO stood out in terms of green renewable power cost and availability, accessibility and existing Capex-reducing infrastructure from former paper production near the site.

“Proximity to the regions district heating plant gives potential for exceptionally power effective data centres.”

Crypto One’s investment into Norway comes days after Norway made headlines worldwide after the largest data centre in world was announced for the north of the country.

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

19

JANUARY 2018

Mega tech giants Facebook, AWS to expand Ireland data centre footprints July 2017

Google could be planning a mega data centre campus in Europe November 2017

Country is on the verge of topping a combined data centre investment of €4.6bn, as construction continues across the island.

The world’s largest social media company and the world’s largest public cloud operator are both set to invest in their data centre footprints in Ireland.

First, Facebook is reportedly readying to “double down” on its Irish data centre infrastructure by expanding its €200m building in Co Meath, in the northeast of Ireland.

The first facility in Clonee – Facebook’s first data centre in the country measuring 31,000 sqm – is still under construction, however, Facebook is said to be reaching out to neighbour landowners to acquire more land around the Clonee campus.

It is also believed that Facebook is currently sourcing construction groups regarding a data centre.

Mark Zuckerberg’s multinational is also carrying out talks with Irish national electricity grid operator, Eirgrid, about power capacity. And power is also driving the world’s largest public cloud AWS to invest more money into Ireland as the company’s €1bn Dublin data centre gains traction.

AWS is working to establish an electricity trading unit in the Irish capital, named Amazon Energy Eoraip, the Irish Independent has found.

The paper said it is unclear what type of electricity trading the unit will be used for, however, it is clearly planned to be used in relation to AWS’ data centres.

AWS operates today in Dublin alone nearly ten facilities. In January this year, the provider acquired more land and put forward a building plan to the Fingal County Council in which seeks permission to build a €1bn data centre park also in Dublin, set to be powered resourcing to renewable energy.

The project has however faced opposition from a member of the public, also behind the delay of Apple’s €850m data centre in Galway.

Ireland has in the last decade become one of the hottest data centre destinations in Europe, with most web scalers, colocation and wholesale providers building out medium to large footprints across the country.

There are currently several sites under construction or about to break ground, totalling more than €2bn in investment. Third party data centre projects are expected to contribute €740m until 2020, according to BroadGroup’s latest report on the country.

Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, AWS and JDC Group are currently the companies investing the most in Ireland.

If Apple is given the go ahead to build its data centre in Galway, and AWS also breaks ground on its Dublin site, the combined amount of data centre investment in Ireland under construction could reach nearly €5bn (€4.6bn).

WORLD

EMEA

Search engine and cloud operator is rapidly scaling out its infrastructure both across its data centre and PoPs portfolio and fiber cabling. Google has acquired a 131 hectare piece-of-land in Aabenraa, Denmark, a stone away from Apple’s $1bn data centre. This is the third large lot bought by Alphabet’s Google in the last six months in the Nordics alone.

However a Google spokesperson has said the company has no immediate plans to break ground on a cloud facility, the same spokesperson said the company is securing land for the possible expansion of its data centre footprint in Europe. The land acquisition is of such significance for Denmark, that even the country’s energy minister has commented on the purchase.

“This is great news. It signals that Google has plans in Denmark, and I think it’s because we have some of Europe’s lowest power prices for companies, some of the greenest energy, and a high security of supply,” Lars Christian Lilleholt told Reuters.

The plot could become home to one of Denmark’s largest foreign investment ever should Google announce a mega data centre campus similar to others it operates where capital expenditures easily reach between $1bn to $2bn. The Aabenraa plot is the second Google acquires in Denmark this year alone following the market trend to invest in the region.

Back in June, the California technology giant purchased 73.2 hectares of land in Frederica, in a deal evaluated at $9.86m.

The company also said at the time it had no plans to break ground on a new data centre.

Neighbouring data centres include those operated by Facebook, IBM and similarly to Aabenraa, Apple. Elsewhere, Google has also acquired a 109-hectare site in Avesta, Sweden, hours away from Facebook’s data centre.

Just like the two plots in Denmark, the multinational said it has currently no plans to build a data centre in the region, however, the site was acquired to ensure the company has land to do so when demand requires. All three plots of land, which combined amount to 313.2 hectares of land, are situated close to multimegawatt power sources.

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

20

JANUARY 2018

Data centre colocation supply tumbles across Europe in Q2, London and Paris lead fall August 2017

Analysts warn the market is not slowing down, but is changing with the expansion of competing regional locations within each country.

The German city had at the end of Q2 2017 a supply MW of just over 6.5, compared to more than 8 MW in the previous quarter.

Colocation supply in the second quarter of 2017, both in terms of MW and sqm, has dropped across Europe’s main four hosting hubs of London, Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam when compared to the previous quarter.

In terms of supply sqm, Frankfurt’s drop was also the smallest, from just below 7,000 sqm to more than 6,500 sqm.

London and Paris led the fall, with both cities also lagging behind Q2 2016’s values, according to BroadGroup’s “Colocation Market Quarterly Q2 2017” report. Frankfurt and Amsterdam have also registered a slowdown in available supply.

The lack of significant data centre builds opeining in Q2 has also contributed to the drop in available supply.

The British capital has registered the largest drop with supply MW decreasing from just above 6MW in Q1 2017, to below 4 MW. In terms of sqm, London has also had the deepest decline, going from nearly 5,000 sqm to just above 3,000 sqm.

Paris’ drop follows closely, with supply MW downgrading from around 4.5 MW to below 3.5 MW in Q1 and Q2 2017 respectively.

As for supply sqm, the French capital’s decrease in supply was less than Amsterdam’s, going from more than 3,000 sqm to just above 2,500 sqm.

The third largest drop was seen in Amsterdam, which in Q1 2017 had the largest percentage of supply MW between the four cities.

The Dutch city has gone from nearly 8.5 MW in the first quarter to just over 7.2 MW in the second quarter. In terms of supply sqm, Amsterdam dropped from more than 7,000 sqm to below 6,400 sqm in the last two quarters.

Lastly, Frankfurt has in the second quarter seen the highest increase in both supply terms compared to the other four rival cities, however, it has also experienced a supply drop.

WORLD

EMEA

Despite the drop-in supply in Q2, analysts highlighted in the report that although London, Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt face some growing competition from regional locations in their home markets, all are proving they can remain as the key location.

However, analysts also expect the market to become more diverse with the large-scale adoption of edge data centres, “but this does remain more of a five-year development to get towards the 20-30 data centre locations per country”.

As for London and the UK as a whole, much has been discussed around Brexit and the country’s departure from the European Union. However, analysts said Brexit is still not causing damage to the British colocation market.

Philip Low, chairman of BroadGroup, said: “In terms of London and Brexit, we are still seeing relatively limited impact. This has been particularly helped by the hyperscale cloud companies increasing their commitment to the UK, particularly Google and Microsoft.

“All the cloud players are also HQ in London, rather than a regional location. However, there are increasing signs of financial companies looking to move at least some staff and operations into mainland Europe.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 166

21

DECEMBER 2017

Dublin could become part of europe’s big 4 tier 1 data centre markets June 2017

Third party data centre projects are expected to deliver capital expenditures in excess of €740m by 2020, making Ireland one of the business data centre destinations in Europe. The accelerated growth of the Irish data centre market and more specifically the Dublin region could catapult the Irish capital to the same level as London, Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

This is according to BroadGroup’s latest report “Data Centres Ireland” which argues that the presence of webscales mainly in the Dublin area makes a strong argument for the city to be re-classified as a Tier 1 hub.

Philip Low, chairman at BroadGroup, said: “Given Ireland’s distinct data centre market, Dublin’s eco system of both third party and hyperscale facilities, and international connectivity, there is a strong argument for the city to be re-classified as a Tier 1 hub in Europe.”

The report finds that the low corporate tax in Ireland has been a key contributor to the country’s booming data centre industry which has seen both webscales and enterprises from the gaming, pharmaceuticals and content sectors build their IT infrastructure on Irish soil. BroadGroup has also found that Ireland is sustaining further expansion by third party data centres.

Active government support for inward investment by hyperscales from such as Amazon and Microsoft has resulted in the construction of massive facilities around Dublin. Even now authorities are seeking to identify potential land banks for new large scale data centre facilities in Ireland, which indicates that the supply of more space will continue to enter the market.

The overriding attraction of Ireland is due to its status in the EU and low tax rates, with data centre investment across a range of business models and has become the main hub for webscales regionally. It has also fostered the development of renewable energy – primarily wind energy – and is targeting 40% by 2020 well beyond the EU mandatory benchmark of 16%.

Connectivity is supported by a range of international cable capacity, with the first direct submarine cable system from Ireland to France (bypassing the UK) due to be launched from Q3 2019. The country also has a high installed base of fibre and dark fibre with further deployment planned.

Research for the report finds that should all current plans for thirdparty expansion come to fruition a total investment of €740m will be made by the end of 2020. The report provides forecasts for both m2 and MW across both third party data centres, and webscales present in the country through to 2020.

BroadGroup will be hosting the first Datacloud Ireland conference at the Dublin Convention Centre on September 21st which includes a special workshop covering GDPR, enterprise meetings, and data centre tours.

ST Telemedia buys Brockton Capital LLP’s entire stake in Virtus data centres October 2017

Company vows to grow the London data centre player “within the UK and in new European markets”. Shooting down any uncertainty around Brexit, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) has made one of its biggest moves in the UK market by acquiring the full portfolio of London operator Virtus Data Centres.

STT GDC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of ST Telemedia, bought 51% of Virtus portfolio owned by Brockton Capital LLP, which has previously announced it would invest up to £100m in Virtus’ expansion over the next five years.

Prior to today’s acquisition, STT GDC owned 49% of Virtus stake through an investment made back in 2015. Following the deal, STT GDC said it intends to invest in Virtus to expands the provider’s reach within the UK and elsewhere in Europe. Virtus will also be given the opportunity to leverage on STT GDC’s resources for expansion and global customer acquisition purposes.

The STT GDC network comprises 53 data centres in several global economic hubs, including China, India, and Singapore. STT GDC also operates through other two data centre companies, including GDS and SST Telemedia Connect. Virtus operates today four data centre buildings in London, and has recently announced it will build two more buildings in London, creating the capital’s largest data centre campus.

With addition of the two data centres, Virtus portfolio will expand to 100MW and will have the potential to expand to circa 150MW.

WORLD

EMEA

Sio Tat Hiang, Chairman of ST Telemedia Global Data Centres, said: “We are seeing a burgeoning demand for colocation in the UK and European data centre market, and there is no better time than now to expand our presence there supporting our customers’ growth plans.

“The acquisition reflects our commitment and continued confidence in the key UK and European economies. Through this acquisition, we hope to further cement our footprint in the UK, as well as accelerate growth for both STT GDC and VIRTUS.” Neil Cresswell, Chief Executive Officer of VIRTUS Data Centres, said, “We are thrilled to deepen our relationship with STT GDC who share the same goals as us – to deliver world-class infrastructure and service to our customers, to be the top player in the market and to continue to grow the portfolio to meet the ever-increasing customer demands.

“This transaction will help VIRTUS continue to thrive in our market and fuel our growth plans. With STT GDC’s continued support, VIRTUS remains committed to supporting our customers with flexible and cost-efficient solutions at scale.”

Simon Samuels, Partner at Brockton Capital LLP, said: “VIRTUS has experienced rapid growth in the last few years and we are extremely pleased with the company’s performance. We have enjoyed a fantastic partnership with STT GDC and are proud of the development of the VIRTUS business to where it is today. We are confident the business is in good hands to continue its trajectory in a high growth market.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

22

JANUARY 2018

Credit Suisse sells UK, Singapore data centres to Iron Mountain, the company’s first ever sites outside USA October 2017

What Brexit? Colt latest to give UK vote of confidence with aggressive data centre expansion February 2017

UK transaction is the second large data centre acquisition in less than 10 HOURS following ST Telemedia Global Data Centres acquisition of Virtus Data Centres.

Iron Mountain’s first data centre locations beyond US borders will be in London and Singapore following a $100m acquisition of two Credit Suisse facilities.

The sale of the two sites will add to Iron Mountain’s portfolio 273,000 sqf of space and over 14 megawatts (MW) of capacity (including future expansion).

In addition, Credit Suisse will enter into a long-term lease with Iron Mountain to maintain their existing data centre operations amounting to 4.2MW of the power capacity available.

The London data centre is 120,000 total sqf and located in the Slough Trading Estate, one of the densest data centre hubs in the UK. Meanwhile, the Singapore data centre is 153,000 total sqf and located in Serangoon.

Company opens and announces more expansion at one of its flagship buildings in the British capital.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, with completion anticipated in the first quarter of 2018. The company intends to fund the purchase with proceeds from share issuance under its ATM program, filed earlier today.

Colt Data Centre Services has expanded its data centre fleet in London due to high demand for colocation and cloud services that has not slowed down with Brexit and the UK-EU negotiations for the country to leave the EU.

Iron Mountain President and CEO William L. Meaney, said: “With these acquisitions – our first outside of the US and the agreement coming just weeks after the acquisition of the Fortrust data centre – we are continuing to expand our global data centre capabilities.

In total, Colt Data Centre Services has added 2,000 sqm of new capacity in London by building four data halls.

“The demand for, and growth in, our data centre offerings has been consistent and strong, drawing customers in highly regulated industries.

“The combination of our capabilities and the recent completion of the first phase of our Northern Virginia campus would strengthen the foundation of our fast-growing data centre business, and are consistent with Iron Mountain’s strategic focus on leveraging our core strengths to develop and accelerate the growth of new business opportunities.”

The new colocation space adds an extra 6.4 MW of IT capacity to the existing 12 MW currently available at the London 3 facility. The facility has now a total power provision of 18.4 MW. The design methodology uses a distributed cooling system which has enabled the facility to achieve a PUE of 1.15.

Other design efficiencies include a method of hot aisle containment which allows for higher power densities of 8kW delivered to each customer rack.

The London 3 data centre has now seventeen data halls, with an additional two halls already under construction to further expand its capacity this year to 11,000 sqm. Construction works are expected to be finished by June 2017.

Detlef Spang, EVP Data Centre Services at Colt, said: “The expansion of our London 3 data centre facility is testament to the exploding demand for flexible data centre space from the capital, a flourishing global technology hub.

“Customers are seeking reliable, cost-effective and scalable data centre solutions which complement their hybrid IT strategies.

“Colt Data Centre Services is focused on being the most trusted and customer-centric data centre provider – we are committed to investing and expanding to meet our customers’ growing requirements.”

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

23

JANUARY 2018

GDPR mastered: preparing for history’s biggest data privacy revolution June 2017

What should companies do in that situation?

As Europe and the world prepare for the introduction of the new General Data Protection Regulation in May 2018, João Marques Lima talks to Sheila FitzPatrick, Attorney, data privacy expert and Chief Privacy Officer at NetApp.

SF: Companies really need to look at their risk profile from a privacy perspective: do you want to put your data in a public environment; could that harm you if that data is exposed; what happens if there is a data privacy violation on the part of your cloud provider; are you as a customer going to have full liability, because you could not negotiate the terms with your provider, which is currently the case.

Have businesses been left out of the GDPR discussion?

This interview originally feature in the Data Economy magazine.

SF: Absolutely. There is a lot of miscommunication. Companies are trying to sell tools and technology to solve the GDPR problem and that is naturally a misunderstanding, because first and foremost, GDPR is a legal compliance issue.

If you do not have a solid data privacy compliance framework in place, the tools and technology are not going to help you. Same thing happens if you do not have the right policy and procedures in place, if you do not have bidding corporate rules and model contractual clauses.

Negotiating privacy terms is extremely difficult. You ask a privacy question, you will normally get a security answer.

What should companies take into consideration when writing explicit consent terms once GDPR comes into force?

SF: That is going to have to change under GDPR, because one of the requirements is clear: freely given explicit and unambiguous consent. And the consent language has to be easy to read.

It has to be very clear about what data you are collecting, how you are using that data, where it is going to be stored, how you are going to maintain it, and who is going to have access to it.

In addition, you cannot have written a consent that is very small in print and too long.

If you do not have explicit consent or data privacy agreements or contractual agreements, how good are the tools and the technology?

Tools and technology are going to be extremely important, they help you maintain ongoing compliance with GDPR but they are not going to help you obtain compliance.

No one is going to read three pages. It has to be very precise and very digestible and very simplistic so that people clearly understand what they are signing up for.

There is a subtle difference between obtaining the compliance and maintaining the compliance.

If the consent is too ambiguous, too long, too generic, if it gets challenged in court the complainers will lose, because the court will say “there is no way an individual knew what they agreed to because you did not write a consent that was digestible and readable”.

Form a data centre operator’s perspective, how is GDPR going to work?

SF: Under GDPR there is going to be more accountability and liability on the part of data processors and also on the cloud providers as defined as data processors. What is going to happen is that there has to be a tremendous amount of transparency from cloud providers which currently does not always exist on not only where the data centre is, because it is very easy to say that by putting the data centre in Germany we will comply with GDPR and you can keep your data in Germany.

Are GDPR sanctions enough to deter companies and make them change their behaviour?

SF: It has already got their attention. It certainly is the one area where C-level executives are starting to pay attention. Four percent of a global annual revenue is pretty substantial and will put some companies out of business.

That is not necessarily 100% true, but main data centres may very well be in Germany, but where is that data backed up and replicated?

It will still be those large multinational organisations that their entire business relies on data that will try to push back and in their head they might think: there is no way we will be fined this.

If the cloud provider uses a third-party provider to support their environment, where are they located, because they might not necessarily be in the same jurisdiction which means that by default your data is already leaving the country where the data centre exists and there is more questions to ask around ‘how does your cloud provider comply with data privacy laws?’

However, what is going to happen is that the data protection authority is going to look for that first case, and that first case that they find, that first company that they can actually hold it accountable and sanction will become the poster child to get companies to rethink their position. They cannot be arrogant any longer.

This is where there are a lot of holes, because when you push back and say ‘how do you comply with GDPR?’ they default to Privacy Shield. But Privacy Shield is going to be invalidated, it does not meet the requirements from GDPR.

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

24

JANUARY 2018

AMERICAS New York could land one of the US’s (and world) largest data centre campus June 2017

Over 40 buildings are set to be demolished to give way to data hub covering more than 2.6 million sqf of land with site works set to start in June. The fight for the largest data centre campus is about to heat up in the US as a State of New York’s town board is preparing to sell a large piece of land to an unknown data centre developer.

The peripheral roads and avenues are set to remain open to public use, however, others inside the piece of land will be closed. This includes Second Avenue and Maple Street. The Town Board will discuss proposed zoning, to be called “RPC-Office Park”, the terms of sale and the approval process.

Located 32 Km from lower Manhattan, the town of Orangetown, in the Rockland county, is readying the sale of 60 acres to a “single-user data centre developer”. At more than 2,600,000 sqf, the campus located at the former Rockland Psychiatric Centre, would make it straight to the Top 10 largest campus in the world falling short to other hubs run by companies such as Switch Supernap.

At its meeting on February 7, the Town Board will commence a statemandated SEQRA review on the sale of public land and adoption of zoning for the site, including setting a public hearing on these actions for March 14. The Town Broad says it is confident the data centre project will get the final go ahead in the coming weeks.

However, the first phase of the project could see a building measuring ‘only’ 150,000 sqf built at the centre of the state. The administration of Orangetown said both the price for the land and the buyer’s name will remain undisclosed for now. An announcement is expected on February 7. Nevertheless, this is set to be a large development topping several millions of dollars. If the total area is used, it could easily top over $1bn in investment if compared to similar projects in the US. Orangetown’s Town Hall supervisor Andrew Stewart, unveiled the cost associated with soil abatement and demolition of the more than 40 buildings currently erected at the site alone would top $40m.

Stewart said: “Myself and the town council feel strongly that data centres are a great fit for this site – they generate very little traffic and they pay taxes.

RPC-Office Park to see works starting soon The unknown data centre provider has, on January 31, presented to the town council its project for the site. In a statement, the council said: “The site plan shows a large building roughly centred in the “core” area of the town’s RPC land, a 60 acre parcel bounded by Convent Road on the north, Oak Street on the south, and lying between First and Third Avenues.”

EMEA

“We provided that roadmap and set of deadlines for submission of complete plans. Orangetown is “all hands on deck” for this project, and I am very impressed with the professionalism and intensity of the applicant’s teamwork as well. “Working together we can get this done and finally turn the corner on the RPC site.”

New data centre joins growing hub

“High density housing is not acceptable due to tax and school impacts, and very few businesses can afford the $40m estimated cost of abatement and demolition at this site. “Since time is money, to get this deal I worked with town staff to create a very aggressive review and approval process that, if all goes well, will yield final site plan approval by the Planning Board on June 14, demolition in July and construction beginning in November.” The operator who buys the land will be taking over one of the locations where Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black” series has been partially filmed. The Rockland Psychiatric Centre is also notorious for its paranormal activity.

WORLD

Demolition works are expected to start in mid-June, and construction of the data centre campus could break ground between July 2017 and early 2018. Stewart said: “Weeks ago, the applicant told me their proposal hinged in part on the town providing a pathway to approval by the end of June.

The mega-data centre campus yet to be unveiled follows from other large developments in and around the Orangetown area that directly compete with operators across the state’s border in New Jersey. Two of the biggest projects in the last few years include a 232,000 sqf, 24MW data centre by 1547 Critical Systems Realtyopened in Orangeburg in 2015.

Bloomberg LP has also opened a site in the town with investment topping $710m to be build a 131,805 sqf data centre. Colocation company Green House Data has also opened a data centre in the area with 20,000 sqf of white space and 2 MW of power. Many of the data centre builds in Orangetown have been given extended tax breaks and sales tax incentives by the Rockland County Industrial Authority.

Green House Data has also explained that when it chose to set a base in the region, the safety from floods and hurricanes played a major part. The closeness to New York City, one of the most digital intensive cities in the world and home to the New York Stock Exchange, is also a driver for operators to build in Orangetown. The area is has also seen in recent years an investment in fiber infrastructure and electricity grids.

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

25

JANUARY 2018

The end of Silicon Valley?

Here’s how much software engineers earn worldwide February 2017

From Silicon Valley to Sydney, technology related jobs are some of the most well paid alongside physicians, lawyers and research and development specialists.

Software engineer salaries are likely to be nearly two thirds lower depending on where a worker is based, a recent survey carried out

by Hired has revealed taking into account 280,000 interview requests and job offers posted by more than 5,000 companies to 45,000 potential employees.

Race and age are still looked at by employers Hired has also looked into the role of race and age when it comes to software engineers’ salaries in the US. The company has found that black workers are the least well paid with the average salary being up to 8.6% less than white colleagues ($115k compared to $125k).

For example, a software engineer based in Paris is expected to earn on average $55k, much below the most well paid software engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area who cash in on average $134k per year.

The US is in fact the country that pays the highest salaries, which according to Hired has to do with the maturity of the market.

Latinos and Asians sit in the middle, with average salaries of $120k and just over $123k respectively. Hired said: ” When we look at our two largest markets on Hired’s platform, San Francisco and New York, the average African-American candidate on the Hired platform is 49% more likely to get hired than the average white person.

Cities such as Seattle, New York and Los Angeles are the next on the rank at $126k, $120k and $117k respectively. However, this is not a trend that is found across the whole of North America. For instance, a software engineer in Toronto, Canada, ‘only’ earns on average $74k a year. This lags behind places like Melbourne and Sidney where salaries top $83k and $81k respectively.

“Interestingly enough, the average Latino candidate is 26 percent less likely than the average white candidate, and the average Asian candidate is 45 percent less likely.” In addition to race, Hired has found that Ageism is still playing a role when it comes to employing and setting the salary of a given worker.

Paying the least together with Paris are London ($73k) and Singapore ($61k). Yet, when salaries worldwide are adjusted to the cost of living in San Francisco, the rank shifts completely. According to Hired, in this scenario, Austin comes first with salaries averaging $198k.

The survey has found that when workers turn 45 years old, their salary stops matching their experience and becomes more based on age and their ability to fit within a company’s culture and even the knowledge that given worker has with the latest technology. “Candidates between the ages of 25 and 30 receive the highest number of average job offers. Once candidates pass the age of 45, however, they begin to see a decrease in their average salary and the number of job offers they receive.

Toronto, which in gross salary is behind most North American cities, also comes quite high at $149k. All the cities outside North America also reached figures much higher. Sydney and Melbourne hit $205k and $165k respectively, while London topped $104k, Paris $98k and Singapore $90k.

“While salaries peak around ages 45-50, after the age of 50 we see a significant decrease in these individuals’ ability to draw salaries commensurate with their experience. “Companies offer an average of $132k to candidates between age 50 and 60, which is on par with what they’re offering to candidates who are ten years younger, and presumably, who have ten years less experience.”

In the report, Hired said: “For decades, Silicon Valley has been the epicentre of the tech industry, but the rise of new technology and innovation hubs across the United States and the world are challenging the Bay Area’s reign. “Our analysis shows it’s a great time for tech workers to consider a role outside Silicon Valley.”

AWS cloud loses traction to Azure (and that outage is not even to blame) March 2017

Of the $1.3tr spent on IT, $60bn are estimated to be put towards cloud deployments which Microsoft seems to be reaping the benefits from.

Microsoft might finally be on the right path to win over a larger stake of the public cloud market as noted by investment-banking think tank Pacific Crest Securities.

The company’s Senior Research Analyst and Partner Brent Bracelin has surprised markets by lowering Amazon’s price target from $905 to $895 as the company faces fiercer competition in its cloud business – AWS – from other web scalers.

Driving that price drop is Microsoft’s and Google’s recent successful efforts to secure new business with startups and Fortune 500 companies. Bracelin said: “AWS boasts a multiyear lead over Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. However, heavy investments could increase the viability of these alternatives. “After three years of outsized

WORLD

EMEA

gains and a tripling of profits, AWS’ growth could moderate this year and next.

“Amazon has been wildly successful, is by far the market leader, and has a multi-year advantage. “But on the margins for customers who have not embraced AWS, Microsoft offers the option of running Azure inside their own data centres and move workloads in a much less disruptive manner.”

Bracelin has also pointed that Microsoft Azure appears to be gaining ground within large enterprises “as not only a functional substitute for AWS, but also as having unmatched product breadth that spans both on-premise and cloud environments”. In addition, and despite making headlines all over the world, AWS’s recent outage in the US has not influenced Bracelin’s move to downgrade the company. Bracelin said: “Everyone has outages, even companies with internal data centres.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

26

JANUARY 2018

CES 2017: Tier IV data centre launches to serve panCaribbean region (and it’s category 5 hurricane proof) January 2017

Brazil, Angola 6,165km internet subsea cable loading officially starts April 2017

First submarine cable to cross the South Atlantic is set to be brought fully online in the second half of 2018 with a bandwidth of 100Gbit/s.

The loading of a cable connecting Angola to Brazil has been initiated on the African shore as related marine surveys conclude.

The South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) will measure 6,165 Km in length and land in Fortaleza on the Brazilian side and at Sangano beach, Luanda, on the Angolan side.

Completion of the marine survey means that final manufacturing can be completed and any minor route and/or cable type adjustments can be fine-tuned based on the actual survey findings.

Partners to the Curacao data centre include companies like Cisco, VMware, EMC, Intel and Schneider Electric. A data centre with the highest certification in the market today has been launched by operator Dataplanet N.V. at CES 2017 in Las Vegas.

The company introduced Blue NAP Americas, a 60,000 sqf building with 50,000 sqf od hosting space and an extra 10,000 sqf for future expansion. The data centre sitting in Curacao, equipped with dual independent fully redundant 5 MW power plants, has been designed to meet growing demand for network connectivity in Latin, Central, North America and the Caribbean markets.

According to Dataplanet N.V., the facility will help boost connectivity in the pan-Caribbean region as a network access point and provide physical colocation, private cloud services, business continuity and managed services.

The cable has been designed with four fibre pairs with each fibre pair capable of transmitting 100 wavelengths with a bandwidth of 100Gbit/s.

The SACS is to interconnect with the Monet cable system — connecting the United States and Brazil — and WACS, the West Africa Cable System.

Owned by Angola Cables, the system will further links into WACS, a cable system which provides carrier level services to operators in Angola and Sub-Saharan Africa across 11 countries.

As a 14,530 km cable running from Yzerfontein (South Africa) to London (UK), WACS has four fibre pairs and includes 14 landing points, 12 along the western coast of Africa (including Cape Verde and Canary Islands) and two in Europe (Portugal and England).

By being built in Curacao, part of the Netherlands, legislation regarding data will be the same used in the European country.

Angola Cables has commissioned NEC Japan and contracted Ocean Specialists, Inc (OSI) to oversee the construction process, all to assure the highest levels of quality.

In addition, the data centre sits in a e-commerce free fiscal zone with 2% profit tax, and no customs tax once a client’s IT equipment has been imported to Blue NAP Americas.

Antonio Nunes, CEO of Angola Cables, said: “We have worked closely with our partners and suppliers to ensure the highest possible value of the SACS network for our customers.

With less than 160,000 inhabitants and 444 sq km, the island of Curacao is situated in a hurricane region, however, the company claims the building has been built to withstand hurricanes of up to category five, which covers the strongest possible natural phenomenon which can register wind speeds of 252 Km/ or more (157 mph).

“As part of our global connectivity strategy, SACS will offer the first direct, high-capacity southern transatlantic connection.”

The data centre will be using VCE’s Vblock infrastructure with further technology from partners such as EMC, VMware, Cisco, Schneider Electric and Intel.

Paul De Geus, CEO of Dataplanet N.V., said: “At Blue NAP Americas, not only do we provide you with a secure, reliable, carrier-neutral facility with state of the art technology, we also cultivate an ecosystem of collaboration with our clients.

Artur Mendes, Chief Commercial Officer for Angola Cables, said: “These key milestones illustrate that the SACS cable is on target for completion as Angola Cables continues to build sales momentum for delivery of services on SACS by the middle of 2018.

“Increasingly, customers are turning to the southern transatlantic route for diversification and security. SACS, coupled with Monet and the existing WACS cable, provide unparalleled value for which we are seeing very high demand in the marketplace.”

“Blue NAP Americas is more than just a data centre, it is a place to exchange great ideas that create a better, more connected world.” As for CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual event takes place in Las Vegas, US, between January 5 and 7. Nearly 200,000 are expected to attend what is one of the largest technology trade shows around.

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

27

JANUARY 2018

Google continues buying huge parcels of land to build data centres November 2017

After scooping 313 acres in Europe, cloud giant has now bought an extra 148 in one of the world’s most budging data centre markets.

Google is continuing its land grab with the acquisition of 148 acres in Northern Virginia where it will build two data centre facilities.

In total, the global public cloud provider invested $70m in acquiring the parcel which is in fact made of two different plots, according to the Loudoun Times-Mirror.

The two pieces of land are located in Loudoun County and measure 91 acres and 57 acres.

“Loudoun County has been a great partner and we look forward to becoming a part of the community.”

The larger parcel cost Google $39m and the company said it plans to begin the construction of a data centre as early as next year.

According to Google officials, the company is also in discussions to buy an additional parcel in the same location which would see Google invest an extra $19m.

Loudoun County Gov. Terry McAuliffe also said: “I am proud to welcome Google to Loudoun County, and we look forward to a strong partnership.

“The state’s information technology sector is booming with nearly $12bn in capital investment over the past decade employing over 13,500 Virginians.

The second parcel sits within the Stonewall Business Park and has reportedly cost $31m bringing the total value to $70m.

However, contrary to Google’s plans for the first plot, the company said it has no plans to break ground on a new facility in the near future but the land will be used for that end when business demand forces to do so.

Google’s Public Affairs Manager Liz Schwab told the Times-Mirror: “We have purchased property in Northern Virginia to increase our capacity and meet the growing demand for Google’s services in the area.

“Virginia is a key hub for global internet traffic, emerging as one of the most active data centre markets in the world. We are honoured that yet another industry giant has chosen Virginia for its next data centre operation — a clear sign that we are building an open and welcoming new Virginia economy.”

Verizon officially kills cloud business 6 years after $1.4bn Terremark acquisition May 2017

Pressure from AWS, Microsoft, Google and others continues to make victims, especially in the telecommunications business space.

Days after officially stepping out of the data centre arena, Verizon has now also reached an end to its cloud business which is to be bought by IBM. The company entered the cloud infrastructure space in 2011 after buying Terremark for $1.4bn and officially launched the product in 2013.

However, in 2014, the telecommunications provider unveiled plans to exit from the cloud business and in April 2016 shut down the service.

Now, Verizon and IBM have come to an agreement to sell Verizon’s cloud footprint to IBM. George Fischer, SVP and Group President, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, said: “Last week, Verizon agreed to sell its cloud and managed hosting service to IBM. Additionally, Verizon agreed

WORLD

EMEA

to work with IBM on a number of strategic initiatives involving networking and cloud services.

“This is a unique cooperation between two tech leaders to support global organizations as they look to fully realise the benefits of their cloud computing investments.”

Fischer went on to say that the agreement, which is expected to close later in 2017, presents “a great opportunity for Verizon Enterprise Solutions (VES) and IBM customers”.

He said: “It is the latest development in an ongoing IT strategy aimed at allowing us to focus on helping our customers securely and reliably connect to their cloud resources and utilise cloudenabled applications.

“Our goal is to become one of the world’s leading managed services providers enabled by an ecosystem of best-in-class technology solutions from Verizon and a network of other leading providers.”

According to the latest data from Synergy Research, IBM is one of the world’s top five cloud infrastructure providers.

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

28

JANUARY 2018

Equinix faces being sued after 16,000 lose server access in Brazil’s ‘largest digital blackout’ January 2017

Mr Mendes said ServerLoft then released “two more laconic communicates, that said nothing at all”. In the first document, the company said they would free up the data in up to 60 days.

In the second file, ServerLoft tried to blame Equinix for the situation once more.

Colo caught up in large scandal created by ServerLoft which has “shocked” the industry. Data Economy spoke to owner who has been accused of keeping clients’ data hostage.

Data centre provider Equinix could be sued in Brazil after servers were switched off triggering the country’s “largest digital blackout” ever which affected 16,000 organisations, including town halls, hospital services, schools, e-commerce websites and manufacturing plants.

“Clients then went to the available addresses associated with ServerLoft, including Mr Zivieri’s home and his mother’s home.

There, his family told clients that Mr Zivieri was being medicated and emotionally shaken, reason why he could not help.

The provider shut the services down after local cloud distributor ServerLoft failed to pay six monthsworth of services to Equinix between July and December 2016.

“In the end, we understood that Mr Zivieri fooled several providers, misleading people who believed in the cloud service being offered by him. People were also fooled into believing the size of his company, the non-existent back-up site in Rio de Janeiro and the technical team.

The machines were offline at Equinix’s SP2 data centre starting December 19, 2016 for a consecutive period of eight days. Equinix then put the servers back up so ServerLoft’s customers could extract their data and migrate to other data centres.

ServerLoft’s owner, 26-year-old Mr Paulo Roberto da Silva Zivieri, has been accused of misleading customers and providers including Equinix, Dell, Juniper Networks and VMware.

Speaking to Data Economy, Adriano Mendes, partner and specialist in Digital Law and technology at Assis e Mendes Law Firm, said: “The damage [caused by the downtime] was vast and we are now looking into and gathering enough evidence to open a case against ServerLoft and Mr Zivieri.

“The more we investigated, the bigger was our surprise that Mr Zivieri was just a “boy” with no technical knowledge who sub-contracted all the services.

“ServerLoft was just an elegant website, with a good marketing investment.”

Process to get servers back on was long and unnecessary Despite Equinix understanding the scale of the problem, Mr Mendes said that Assis e Mendes Law Firm had to take legal action and to get in touch with the juridical and business departments at Equinix.

“We are also looking into suing Equinix because they could have re-connected the machines earlier and without the need of a judicial order in order for clients to extract their data.”

“Even though they understood what had happened, Equinix said at the beginning they could not help and they depended on a judicial order to re-establish the services.

Data Economy has spoken to Mr Zivieri who said he is not yet ready to talk about the case. Equinix was not immediately available for comment.

“We then got the judicial order, made an agreement and managed to temporarily re-establish services giving clients enough time to extract their data and migrate to other providers and data centres.

Mr Mendes explained that Assis e Mendes Law Firm carried out ten collective actions against Equinix and ServerLoft for ten ServerLoft clients before Equinix turned the servers on again for a limited period of time.

“Services were completely off-line for eight days. After services were re-established, data extraction and migration took another seven days.

Equinix blamed by ServerLoft

“After regaining control of their data again, clients managed to go back to their own clients to explain what had happened.”

When the ‘blackout’ started on December 19, Mr Mendes said ServerLoft first blamed Equinix’s data centre for the downtime caused by a fictional power outage.

“It took two days for clients to learn that the problem was caused

by ServerLoft’s lack of payment to Equinix for six months,” he said.

“At that point, ServerLoft stopped talking to customers. Clients and vendors started then to try and talk directly to ServerLoft’s providers in order to try to rescue their data.

Mr Mendes said Mr Zivieri was given the opportunity to go to Equinix’s São Paulo data centre to switch his servers back on for customers to extract their data.

Mr Zivieri failed to show up “continuing to make his customers hostages of the situation”.

“The biggest problem was the fact that providers did not recognise the clients as service users and in contractual terms they could not disclose any information or help due to technical issues and contractual clauses.”

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

29

JANUARY 2018

Equinix, digital realty cement global data centre dominance with multi-billion dollar acquisitions

Intel, Cloudera open source tech unleashes power of artificial intelligence workloads February 2017

June 2017

Aggressive growth of hyperscale data centre operators is also driving business not only to the top two providers but others in the industry. The strong M&A activity sweeping the industry has seen Equinix strengthen its position as the world’s largest colocation provider with a market share of 11% in Q1 2017.

The Redwood City-based operator is followed by Digital Realty, with a market share of 7%, according to data from Synergy Research Group. Equinix announced in December 2016 its intention to acquire 29 data centres from Verizon, in a transaction worth $3.6bn.

In June 2017, was Digital Realty’s turn to invest in expanding its footprint with one of the largest M&As in the data centre industry’s history. The company acquired DuPont Fabros Technology for a total amount of $7.8bn.

Both transactions were used to acquire assets mostly based in the US, which analysts expect to substantially increase both operators’ revenues in the North American market.

Researchers at Synergy Research Group pointed that had the two major M&A deals carried out by the two providers been effective from the beginning of the year, Equinix worldwide market share in Q1 would have been 13% and Digital Realty 9%.

Across the two major market segments – retail colocation and wholesale – Equinix/Verizon would have had a 17% share of retail colocation, while Digital Realty/DuPont Fabros would have had a 31% share of the smaller wholesale segment.

Behind Digital Realty, in third place is NTT with 6% of global revenues, followed by KDDI/Telehouse with 3% and a group of operators that each has a 2% share, including China Telecom, CenturyLink (now Cyxtera), CyrusOne, Global Switch and Interxion.

The data has found substantial growth across all markets, however, it was in the APAC region the highest growth rate occurred. The major countries with the highest growth rates were all in the APAC region and include China, Hong Kong, Japan and Australia.

Across the major regions, Equinix was the leader in EMEA, ranked second in North America and third in APAC. Digital Realty was the leader in North America and NTT the leader in APAC. John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group, said: “The aggressive growth of hyperscale data centre operators and other cloud and hosting companies is helping to drive demand for data centre footprint across all regions, while many enterprise customers require their data centre operators to span multiple metros and countries.

“These fundamental market drivers mean that colocation is increasingly a market where scale and geographic scope determines success. There has been a lot of consolidation in the data centre industry already in 2017, but these two deals stand out.

“Equinix and Digital Realty were already growing much more rapidly than the overall market, and these deals will help them to further distance themselves from the competition.”

WORLD

EMEA

Companies say they see the future potential in AI as untapped, “despite massive leaps in technology and growing implementation in recent years”.

Intel and data management company Cloudera have jointly launched a solution aimed at speeding up the process of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

The need for next generation predictive analytics, with insights being used on real-time automated decision processes has become more relevant to the business layer as enterprises dependence on data increases. The newly launched solution, Benchmark, has been tested on Cloudera with Apache Spark and the Intel Math Kernel Library (Intel MKL) to address their need for speed.

The companies claim that by combining Spark, Intel MKL libraries, and Intel’s optimised CPU architecture machine learning workloads can scale quickly. As machine learning solutions get access to more data they can provide better accuracy in delivering predictive maintenance, recommendation engines, proactive healthcare and monitoring, and risk and fraud detection.

Amr Awadallah, chief technical officer of Cloudera, said: “There is a growing urgency to implement more rich machine learning models to explore and solve the most pressing business problems and to impact society in a more meaningful way.

“Already among our user base, machine learning is an increasingly common practice. In fact, in a recent adoption survey over 30% of respondents indicated they are leveraging Spark for machine learning.”

Michael Greene, vice president and general manager of the System Technologies and Optimisation in Software Services Group, Intel Corporation, said: “As long-term business collaborators invested in each other’s technology, expanding our efforts in AI was a logical step.

“Collectively, we see the future potential in AI as untapped, despite massive leaps in technology and growing implementation in recent years.

“Together Cloudera, Intel and our ecosystem will unleash the power of AI to be faster, more expansive, and smarter from the beginning.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

30

JANUARY 2018

Microsoft future decoded: large 200,000 sqf data centres will literally fit in the palm of your hand November 2017

Strauss said: “Why do we think DNA is a good medium for data storage? First property of DNA that makes it attractive is density.

Once again, Mother Nature steps in with answers to the problems that keep many scientists, technologists and business leaders awake at night: do we have enough space for data on Earth?

“A small smear at the bottom of a test tube has enough capacity to store 10TB of data. Looking at the data centre, cold storage in data centre for about 1EB, with DNA storage, it fits on the palm of the hand.”

The world is producing more data than it can store and humans have to look at new ways to do storage and carry out data processing tasks at speed and in real time, warned Karin Strauss, senior researcher at Microsoft Research.

“We are generating a lot more data than we can actually store,” she said. “Storage capacity is growing too slowly. We cannot storage all the information we generate, we have to throw a lot of it away.

“In 2018, we will be able to storage about 18% of all data generated.

By 2030 that will shrink to 3% and by 2040 it is expected to be half of 1%, and this is worrying.

“We at Microsoft started to look at how to storage more data in the Digital Universe [Microsoft’s name for the all data generated on the planet].”

Essentially, imagine a test tube with a very small drop of ‘water’ at the end, smaller than the graphite end of a pencil. That drop alone is capable of storing 10TB of data. Mind blowing. In comparison, the standard measurements of a 10TB hard drive today are around 10 x 15 x 2.5 cm.

In the hyperscaler world, the use of Synthetic DNA to store data means that it will be possible to reduce a 1EB data centre to around the size of just two dices put together. A 1EB data centre, according to Strauss, averages the size of two combined Walmart stores.

With such stores easily averaging more than 100,000 sqf of shop floor, this means that in the future, a 200,000 sqf data centre today will be the size of two dices leaving much more physical space for storage, especially cold storage.

EMEA

“DNA synthetic fossils survive time and temperature. If you keep DNA at 10 degrees Celcius – which is not hard to keep – you can keep DNA for 2,000 years. DNA is the molecule that natures uses to store information about life.”

She continued: “DNA as a medium never becomes obsolete; we will always be able to read DNA. It is a great very attractive medium for storage.”

To read the DNA data, Strauss explained that digital microfluids can potentially help solve any readability issues.

One answer to the problem lies apparently with Synthetic DNA, a technology that could store 10TB of data in a small liquid drop.

WORLD

To further explain why DNA is an attractive solution for data storage, Strauss then looked at the longevity of DNA data.

“This process is capable of moving liquid and dropping that liquid into a container DNA [enabling the DNA to be read].”

And whilst many will be scratching their heads thinking of how possible this all is, Strauss was clear: “This already exists”. “[At Microsoft] we have so far stored 400MB of digital data and we were able to recover that data bit by bit.

“We can file any type of data. We have encoded the top 100 books from the Project Gutenberg, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in over 100 languages, the Ok Go Video “This Shall Too Pass”, high definition video and also songs that were recorded at the Montreal Jazz Festival.

“400MBs might not be a lot, but I would like to remind you that every technology [in the data space] had to go through this system. And it is our ambition to make this real.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

31

JANUARY 2018

Colossal 400mw hyperscale data centre campus heading to Texas October 2017

Campus sits on a wider 18,000 ACRES development project and will be one of the largest hyperscale hubs in the world at full build.

A super-mega data centre development that puts to shame most other builds has been unveiled by T5 Data Centres in partnership with AllianceTexas.

The two organisations have secured between 350 to 400 acres of land to be used for data centre purposes, which at full build could exceed the 400MW power capacity barrier, which replicates the current capacity of the entire Dallas-Fort Worth marketplace. The hyperscale campus, to be known as T5@Alliance, sits on a wider 18,000-acre plot set to give way to a new community in Fort Worth.

The data centre development of the T5@Alliance campus is backed

by IPI Data Centre Partners Management, LLC (IPI Partners), which invests in data centres and other technology and connectivity-related real assets and is sponsored by ICONIQ Capital, LLC and an affiliate of Iron Point Partners, LLC. The development is served by two separate transmission sources, Brazos Electric Power Cooperative and Oncor.

Pete Marin, President and CEO of T5, said: “Cloud and hyperscale data centre users are looking for locations that can offer a growth pathway, incentives, resiliency and speed to operation, all with low costs. T5@ Alliance offers a perfect combination of these critical requirements.

“This partnership with Hillwood and IPI Partners brings together a highly experienced team ready to deliver hyperscale campuses for discerning data centre customers.”

Mike Berry, president of Hillwood, developer of AllianceTexas, said: “Rapid growth in Fort Worth is catching the attention of large technology companies, like Facebook, and is reinforcing AllianceTexas’ position as a premier destination for data centres.

“This partnership [with T5] will allow us to quickly deliver even more data centre campuses to the growing number of customers who want to more efficiently serve North Texas and the broader market.”

Reid Goetz, vice president of Hillwood, said: “The massive pad sites at T5@Alliance, which are already served with critical infrastructure, make the development a great platform on which the partners can create one of the world’s top data centre destinations.

“Facebook and other Fortune 500 users have already recognized the substantial advantages of this location for massive installations.

Redundancy, the presence of multiple fiber providers, access to an ample volume of water and the region’s moderate weather all help ensure reliable, uninterrupted service of data centres at AllianceTexas.”

AWS’ massive cloud outage proves no one is immune to downtime March 2017

downtime also left several Google Nest users unable to connect their smart thermostats to the product’s app.

Amazon Web Service (AWS) experienced a four-hour outage last night after one of its main US data centres went down sparking confusion across the cyberspace. The problem affected millions of internet users across the globe after it hit the provider’s S3 storage at its US-EAST-1 data centre in the East Coast of the US, one of the company’s oldest facilities.

Commenting on the incident, David Mytton, founder and CEO of Server Density, a scalable infrastructure monitoring company, said: “Regardless of the reliability guarantees, no service has 100% uptime.

The key is to plan for it and test your plan regularly. Assuming core systems have failover options, even if they are outsourced to AWS, is an important part of system design.

The outage impacted hundreds of thousands of users of S3 and even AWS was hit by the downtime as it could not update its own service health dashboard as this is hosted on its cloud. The problems started around 12:35pm ET and services were only restored by 4:49pm ET according to Amazon.

“We are continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1,” Amazon said on its AWS website. The outage has proved that no one is immune to downtime including the internet giants. According to SimilarTech, the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is used by 148,213 websites including Amazon’s online shop, Quora, Indeed, SoundCloud, Slack and GitHub. The majority of the websites are based in the UK (50,185), followed by the UK, Japan, Brazil and France. In total, experts estimate Amazon S3 to be storing somewhere between three and four trillion pieces of data. Other websites experiencing issues included Mashable, which saw users unable to publish new posts and even Apple’s app store, iTunes, FaceTime and other services reported problems.

With the rise of the IoT and connected home devices, AWS’s outage has also sparked concerns around linking home devices as the

WORLD

EMEA

“As even AWS themselves found with the status images, there will always be unexpected dependencies but the impact can be mitigated by knowing how to respond, understanding and assigned your communication channels to your team and building redundancy into the system.” Chuck Dubuque, VP of Product and solution Marketing at Tintri, alerted to the dangers of people and businesses hosting their assets on a single storage platform.

He said: “The S3 outage yesterday demonstrates the risks of putting all your eggs into one cart or cloud. Moreover, it is difficult to engineer even cloud native applications for public cloud SLAs as seen by yesterday’s events.

“It is even more complex to deploy and manage enterprise applications that were not designed for the cloud to begin with. If nothing else, the S3 outages will cause some businesses to reconsider a diversified environment—that includes enterprise cloud—to reduce their risks.”

AWS is one of the world’s largest cloud services provider alongside Google and Microsoft. In 2016, the company reported revenues of $12bn, 55% up from 2015.

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

32

JANUARY 2018

ASIA PACIFIC Asia to build 70 hyperscale data centres February 2017

All countries across the region are expected to see an expansion in data centre offerings with some markets set for a growth rate of up to 36%. Asia is posed for a wave of hyperscale data centre openings set to top 70 new facilities over the next three years driven by market demand for cloud computing and internet services.

“Naturally, the need for data centres is surging. We see a significant opportunity for colocation to close the gap and meet this demand, especially in locations such as China, Hong Kong, Singapore and India where it is critical for them to have effective and efficient ways of running large data centre operations.

According to researchers at BroadGroup the market in Asia is set to continue to expand with growth in capacity and power availability across all countries over the same period of time. In countries such as Malaysia, growth could be as high as 36%. Outsourcing to third party data centres by companies local to the region is also expected to be sustained.

“We expect Asia to continue registering high growth in the colocation market as companies from across the region (and also those entering from other parts of the world) look to agile and flexible data centre solutions that can help them scale up and enable their digital transformations.”

Asia accounted at the end of 2016 with more than 20% of the world’s 300 hyperscale data centres,according to Synergy Research.

The figure is expected to top 400 facilities by the end of 2018. The region is expected to grow its stake on the global stage to around 30-32% based on the projected 70 facilities.

Omer M. Wilson, Senior Director of Marketing, APAC at Digital Realty said: “The Asia Pacific region is at the forefront of the digital economy. Many of the markets here are mobile-first which require companies to have a robust IT infrastructure in order to cope with the substantial consumer demand.

WORLD

EMEA

Making the case for China specifically, Wing-Dar Ker, President of Shanghai Blue Cloud Technologies, a wholly-owned subsidiary of 21Vianet Group, said that internet companies in China are investing billions into their own cloud businesses in coming years, seeking to take advantage of a market with 680 million internet users.

He said: “Cloud computing is a strategic priority for the Chinese government, which has piloted cloud schemes in a number of cities, will only drive the growth of data centres further. “The average growth rate of data centres in the next two years is expected to be 35% or above and market demand for cloud computing and internet services combined with a willingness to invest will drive infrastructure build-up in the next few years.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

33

JANUARY 2018

Australian Gov’t pulls out secret defence data from global switch’s data centres June 2017

Huawei vows to build data centres across all world regions, in all major countries March 2017

Company reiterates primarily focus in public cloud services and private cloud construction.

Huawei has shed some light on its plans to become a cloud world power by unveiling its plans to build dozens of data centres outside the APAC region.

Ma Yue, VP of Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group, said: “We have a roadmap to build data centres across Asia-Pacific and in addition to that, we are actively working with partners around the world to build data centres.

“We have plans for data centres across the world including Asia-Pacific and the regions outside of it in all major countries.

“We will build data centres in all key regions around the world.”

Acquisition of 49% of the data centre operator by Chinese investors sparks worries amongst the nation’s politicians.

The Australian Government has set out an expenditure plan of $200m to move its Department of Defence data from Global Switch’s data centres following a large investment

by Chinese corporations and institutional investors.

According to ABC Australia, the sensitive and intelligence files will be moved back to a government-owned data centre, despite Global Switch guarantees that the data is secure in its data halls based in Ultimo, a suburb of Sydney.

Sydney has now said it plans not to renew its contract with Global Switch which expires in 2020, in “an entirely appropriate decision,” according to Australian Government Treasurer Scott Morrison. Morrison said: “[The Government] acted to ensure the integrity of our foreign investment process when it came to that data centre.

“They [Global Switch] got a very clear message from the Government about how the Government would feel about [the Sydney data centre] being incorporated into that global deal.”

In a statement to the broadcaster, Global Switch’s Asia-Pacific group director Damon Reid, said: “We do not provide IT services to customers, nor do we have access to customer data.

“Our customers lease space which they fit out with their own secure cages with their own servers. Global Switch operates under the highest levels of security and our shareholders are restricted from physical access to the data centre.”

Asked to specify which regions the company was mostly focusing on, Yue jokingly responded: “Specifically in Europe, Africa, Middle East, Commonwealth countries, and North America and Latin America.”

Huawei has this week announced it will open a data centre in New Zealand to help build the country’s digital infrastructure as more business turn to cloud computing.

The company has also deployed a data centre in Abu Dhabi, and is currently building a facility at Dubai’s airport.

Yue said: “Our R&D primarily focuses on cloud computing, big data, internet of things, global networks, software defined networks, and we hope that based on these long term, sustainable and robust technologies. We will continue to invest and drive a leading ICT platform at Huawei.

“Cloud is a buzzword and Huawei is able to provide an ICT platform pulling a synergy across cloud level, the hype level and the device level.

“Various data transmitted through devices will be able to, through the network, be computed on the cloud. And in cloud computing our primarily focus is public cloud services and private cloud construction.

“Together with our partners, and this includes our partnerships with telcos, we are actively expanding the cloud computing business.

“Data centres are a key focus, key direction of our endeavours.”

The Chinese investment happened back in December 21, when a group of corporate and institutional investors acquired a 49% stake of the British data centre operator in a $2.97bn transaction. The lead investor and sponsor of the consortium is Jiangsu Sha Steel Group, the largest private steel maker in China and a member of the Fortune Global 500 list of the world’s biggest companies.

Other investors include AVIC Trust, a joint venture asset management company owned by AVIC Capital and OCBC of Singapore, and Asian institutional investors such as Essence Financial and Ping An Group, which are funding their investments through their respective private equity funds.

Global Switch operates two data centres in Sydney, comprising 786,000 sqf of area.

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

34

JANUARY 2018

Singapore just landed another multi-million dollar data centre March 2017

Six-storey building to be leased to a mysterious client for an initial lease term of more than ten years. Building on its booming data centre business, Singapore has secured another investment in the sector that will see a S$60m ($42.5m as of March 6) data centre being built in the West Region of the city-state.

Behind the construction is Mapletree Industrial Trust (MIT), a Mapletree Industrial Trust Managmeent business arm. The facility will be built as a ‘build-to-suit’ data centre for “an established data centre operator”.

The building has been designed to have six floors and encompass an area of 242,000 sqf which will be fully leased to the non-disclosed client for an initial lease term of more than ten years with staggered rental escalations as well as renewal options.

Located in a piece of land measuring approximately 96,800 sqf, the data centre is expected to be completed in H2 2018. The site is located in a specialised industrial park for data centres with readybuilt infrastructure catered to support multinational companies and enterprises.

“The long-term lease commitment from an established client in the fast growing data centre market will offer portfolio diversification and income stability to unitholders. We look forward to embarking on MIT’s latest BTS project, underscoring our capabilities in creating value through development projects.”

The new data centre follows from two other developments by the MIT including the completion of Tata Communications Exchange at Paya Lebar iPark in 2010 and 26A Ayer Rajah Crescent for Equinix Singapore at one-north in 2015.

The site has been allocated by JTC Corporation and is zoned for Business 2 use with a land tenure of 30 years.

The MIT’s development in Singapore comes at a time when the nation is being targeted by several national and international data centre services providers as well as by telecommunications companies and private businesses.

Tham Kuo Wei, Chief Executive Officer of the Trust, said: “This BTS project marks MIT’s third data centre development and reinforces the strategy to grow the Hi-Tech Buildings segment by providing customised industrial real estate solutions.

Tencent is now worth $522bn, more than Facebook November 2017

Although much of the company’s value was pushed by a recent announcement of a roll out of WeChat services in other Asian markets outside China, the company’s cloud business and data centre has so been a solid revenue driver.

Company is the first in Asia to enter the $500bn club as cloud, social media and gaming business drive market value up.

Chinese operator Tencent Holdings (HKG: 0700) has beaten Facebook in market value as the company is now worth $522bn compared to the American rival at $519bn.

During Q3, Tencent Cloud expanded its global infrastructure coverage and now operates 36 availability zones around the world.

The provider has announced several data centre expansions not only in China but also across Asia, Europe and North America, in Seoul, Mumbai, Moscow, Frankfurt and California.

The company’s shares closed Tuesday trading on a high of 2.38% and at an individual value of HK$430.

Tencent has become the world’s fifth-most valuable company behind Apple – which is the world’s most valuable at $873bn –, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon.

Tencent also invested in AI cloud technologies, big data analytics and security infrastructure to future proof its cloud business.

Tencent, which has become one of the largest cloud and data centre operators in Asia and is behind China’s biggest social network and gaming name, has also become the region’s first ever company to reach a market valuation of higher than $500bn.

Based in Shenzhen, Tencent is the owner of the popular messaging app WeChat used by more than 980 million users monthly and is also the owner of gaming franchises including League of Legends and Honour of Kings.

As the company beats Facebook in market value, its CEO, Ma Huateng, has also had its fortune valued at a whooping $48.3bn, making him the world’s ninth richest person, according to Forbes.

Huateng’s net worth is higher than the one of Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and is ‘only’ $23bn short from Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune.

WORLD

EMEA

In its latest financial report for Q3 2017, Tencent posted betterthan-expected figures, with revenues reaching $9.8bn, up 61% when compared to Q3 2016.

Profit for Q3 this year was also up 67% to $2.7bn and operating profit increased 57% also when compared to Q3 2016 to $3.4bn.

In its report, Tencent said about their cloud business: “We will continue to invest in our cloud business to empower the digital and smart transformation of traditional industries, and to build future drivers of revenue growth and profitability.

“Meanwhile,we will look for collaboration and investment opportunities which can complement our technological capability in order to provide cloud services that fit the needs of our clients.

“We will also open up cloud computing and AI technological capabilities to third party companies in order to build a vibrant ecosystem.”

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

35

JANUARY 2018

Reuben brothers oversee Chinese giants sign deal with global switch in ‘gamechanging’ data centre move April 2017

Agreement plays an important role in delivering China’s Belt and Road initiative, through international expansion of Chinese companies.

China Telecom Global (CTG), Daily-Tech and Global Switch have entered an industry agreement in a move that will see the large Chinese corporations use Western data centres to service customers outside China.

The move, labelled as “game-changing” by the three parties, will enable CTG and Daily-Tech to expand their customer base outside mainland China by using Global Switch’s data centre capacity, services, development and management expertise.

data centre infrastructure, facilities and services as they expand internationally, as well as boosting CTG’s competitiveness in new markets.

“We are also pleased to be taking another significant step forward in delivering against the objectives of China’s Belt and Road initiative.”

Global Switch currently operates ten data centres in connectivity hubs across Europe and Asia Pacific, providing around 300,000 square metres of state of the art technical space. It currently has operations in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney.

Li Qiang, Chief Executive Officer of Daily-Tech, said: “This is an innovative, enabling and global cooperation agreement between three large-scale businesses with significant experience. It will offer new and secure growth opportunities to our strategic customers, and reaffirms our collaborative approach towards overseas expansion, by finding and sharing opportunities with mutual benefits. Ultimately, we aspire to serve more Chinese and international customers by working together.”

The three companies have signed to collaborate in developing new markets, joint marketing of services, create a one-stop service and system access, as well as data centre, network and systems integration services.

John Corcoran, Chief Executive Officer of Global Switch, said: “[The signing of this agreement] represents another core building block in our future growth strategy, and is a further demonstration of the springboard and connectivity we can offer to companies seeking to expand within a secure, professionally managed and world class environment.”

The companies held a special ceremony in Hong Kong to sign the agreement which counted with the presence of Deng Xiaofeng, Chief Executive Officer of China Telecom Global, Li Qiang, Chief Executive Officer of Daily-Tech, and John Corcoran, Chief Executive Officer of Global Switch.

Simon and David Reuben, Directors and long-term core shareholders in Global Switch, were also present at the ceremony. Deng Xiaofeng, Chief Executive Officer of CTG, said: “This pioneering and important agreement will ensure our customers receive quality and secure

A group of Chinese corporate and institutional investors has recently acquired a 49% stake of Global Switch in a $2.97bn transaction that has opened the doors of the Asian market to the company.

GDS Holdings unveils plans to reach half a million sqf of data centre space in Shanghai July 2017

Expansion comes after provider reported a strong quarter one with revenues growing 96% over the previous year quarter. Chinese developer and operator data centres GDS Holdings has unveiled plans to expand its Shanghai footprint which will take its city’ sites to 527,430 sqf of space.

The company currently has three data centres in service at its existing WGQ campus (Shanghai 1 – 3), with a total capacity of 237,053 sqf which is 93.2% committed. The operator has now announced it has started construction of a new data centre campus also in Shanghai which will amount to 152,223 sqf.

A property development partner has agreed to build-to-suit and lease to GDS the shell and core for two data centres, the first of which, to be known as Shanghai 6 (SH6) with a capacity of 76,111 sqf, will enter service in the second half of 2018.

A fourth and final data centre on the existing WGQ campus, SH4, will enter service at the end of 2017. William Huang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GDS Holdings, said: “We have

WORLD

EMEA

enjoyed great success with our flagship data centre campus in the Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, both in terms of attracting top-tier customers and achieving high commitment rates.

“The addition of this new campus in Waigaoqiao is an important strategic development, which positions us to provide continuous supply to our existing customers and to attract significant new customers.

“We believe no other data centre company in China can match our 16-year history delivering world-class operating standards to our customers, as well as our capability to provide flexible expansion capacity to meet customer demand.”

In its last quarterly results, GDS Holdings reported a gross profit growth of 95.9% in Q1 2017 when compared to Q1 2016. In the first quarter of 2017, gross profit was $15.4m, also increasing 39.9% over the fourth quarter of 2016.

In terms of revenue, the company witnessed a growth of 65.8% in Q1 2017 compared to Q1 2016.

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

36

JANUARY 2018

EVENTS

EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

13th March 2018 Datacenter Dynamics Energy Smart Stockholm, Sweden Details coming soon

11th April 2018 DatacenterDynamics Espana Madrid, Spain Details coming soon

31st January 2018 – 1st February 2018

12th–14th June 2018 Datacloud Europe Monaco

Datacloud UK and Finance Investment Forum, London, UK

VISIT WEBSITE

12th June 2018 Datacloud Awards Monaco

We are proud to announce the launch of the inaugural Datacloud UK event collocated with the annual premier Finance and Investment Forum.

Taking place at the Marriott Hotel, Grosvenor Square in London the events will showcase the UK data centre and cloud sector, the largest market in Europe. Both leadership events can be attended with one special networking pass.

VISIT WEBSITE

VISIT WEBSITE

20th June 2018 Datacenter Dynamics Africa Johannesburg, South Africa Details coming soon

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

37

JANUARY 2018

AMERICAS 25th April 2018 Datacenter Dynamics Argentina Buenos Aires, Argentina Details coming soon

1st–2nd May 2018 Datacenter Dynamics Enterprise New York, USA Details coming soon

20th June 2018 Datacenter Dynamics Colombia Bogota, Colombia Details coming soon

26th June 2018 Datacenter Dynamics Webscale San Francisco, USA Details coming soon

4th–7th December 2017 Gartner Data Centre Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit, Las Vegas, NV The Premier Destination for Infrastructure, Operations Management and Data Center Leaders. Enterprise transformation is the new imperative for the data center, infrastructure and operations, the impetus for business-driven strategies and investments.

This conference features comprehensive tracks around the biggest challenges IT infrastructure and operations leaders.

VISIT WEBSITE

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

DATASOURCE

ISSUE 167

38

JANUARY 2018

ASIA PACIFIC 13th February 2018 DatacenterDynamics Indochina Bangkok, Thailand VISIT WEBSITE

5th April 2018 DatacenterDynamics Indonesia Jakarta, Indonesia Details coming soon

22nd March 2018

26th April 2018 DatacenterDynamics Focus On Hyderabad, India

Datacloud Asia 2018 Singapore Pan-regional forum for cloud and data centre leadership.

Meet with leaders, investors and experts for insights and potential business opportunities.

Details coming soon

14th June 2018 DatacenterDynamics Enterprise Shanghai Shanghai, China

Join the leading deal making event for the Asia region, attended by executives from Asia and internationally, the event has acquired a leading reputation as a place to meet operating companies, service providers, network owners, enterprises including hyperscales, expert consultancies and solutions firms.

Details coming soon

VISIT WEBSITE

WORLD

EMEA

AMERICAS

ASIA PACIFIC

EVENTS

Contact us TRANSACTIONS

–– Colo & new build site finding –– Acquisition, disposal & marketing –– Sale & lease back –– Leasing and service (SLA & KPI) agreements –– Market analysis –– Benchmarking

CONSULTING

–– Country & Region analysis –– Total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis –– Total cost of occupation (TCOO) analysis –– Product development –– Planning strategy –– Permissions and approvals –– Power & communication studies –– Capital allowances –– Benchmarking –– Rent reviews –– Lease negotiations –– Property taxes –– Planning applications

Chris Jones

Senior Director Head of Data Centres GVA +44 (0)20 7911 2525 chris.jones@gva.co.uk

+44 (0)20 7911 2000 gva.co.uk

GVA London, United Kingdom: 65 Gresham Street London EC2V 7NQ United Kingdom

GVA GVA is a trading name of GVA Grimley Limited.

Where articles are sourced from external providers the statements and opinions expressed within them are those of the authors alone and not of GVA Grimley Limited or any of its associated, subsidiary or affiliated companies. GVA Grimley Limited will not be held responsible for any claim, loss, damage or inconvenience caused as a result of any information within these pages.

GVA for themselves, for any joint agents and the for the vendors or lessors of this property whose agents they are give notice that: (i) t he particulars are set out as a general outline only for the guidance of intending purchasers or lessees and do not constitute, nor constitute part of,an offer or contract. (ii) all descriptions,dimensions,references to condition and necessary permissions for use and occupation,and other details are given in good faith and are believed to be correct but any intending purchasers or tenants should not rely on them as statements or representations of fact but satisfy themselves by inspection or otherwise as to the correctness of each of them. (iii) no person in the employment of GVA or any joint agents has any authority to make or give any representation or warranty whatever in relation to these properties.