Tuesday, April 20, 2010

A tour round Equinix's new LD5 datacentre

Equinix invited V3.co.uk to be the first to check out its new datacentre in Slough

The facility's being empty means you can fully gauge the immense size of the building and the sheer amount of space the racks require, as the growth of data on the internet soars. The complete building will be able to hold 5,600 cabinets.

Upstairs in Phase One, work is already underway to prepare for the installation of 1,400 cabinets, and a few are already online. Deployments always start on the top floors so that there is no risk of heavy plant vehicles working over a live datacentre.

"We have co-habited areas and dedicated areas being installed at present, and have several firms waiting to move their equipment in," said Equinix sales director Wynn McCabe, pointing to the stacks of racks wrapped in cardboard out side the clean room.

"We've also set up two separate connections between LD4 and LD5, which are 300m apart, using 1,000 fibres in each to make it possible for firms, particularly carriers, to connect racks between the two premises quickly and efficiently," he said.

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"Cloud computing in particular is an area that is growing rapidly, and many firms now use our centres to host their data. Salesforce.com has a presence in every one of our datacentres worldwide. This gives them geographical resilience and helps reduce latency.

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"By 2013 we'll have completed the deployment of all the phases in LD5, and then it'll probably be time to start work on LD6," said McCabe.

We will be posting up a photo story from our Equinix datacentre tour soon, so please check back on the site later.

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