TelecityGroup ups UK datacentre capacity

Datacentre services provider TelecityGroup announced on Monday plans to expand its datacentre capacity within the UK.

The co-location provider will add three megawatts (MW) of customer capacity power to its Harbour Exchange datacentre in London Docklands and will build a new 3.5MW datacentre in Manchester. Customer capacity, when talking in terms of power, means the total amount of power that will go to customer equipment, according to TelecityGroup.

TelecityGroup's managing director for the UK and Ireland, Adriaan Oosthoek, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that Docklands demand is driven by a wish to have low latency to the London stock exchanges. The other factor is connectivity, because "the fibre density in docklands is second to none in Europe".

Oosthoek explained that like competitor Interxion, TelecityGroup has a customer base for its central London datacentres have a customer base that values the ability to take space in a facility with other financial market or connectivity focused customers.

"Being physically able to interconnect helps to build that community, you just need to make sure you have the right people together and we already have those types of customers in the buildings," he said.

The Manchester datacentre will be a new facility, born out of the August acquisition by Telecity of the Internet Facilitators Limited datacentre in Manchester, UK, Oosthoek said.

The Docklands expansion should open in the fourth quarter of 2011 and the Manchester facility by the third quarter of 2011. TelecityGroup currently has 24 datacentres operating across Europe.