A photo tour of Digital Realty's newest London datacentre

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Global strategy

Digital Realty CEO Michael Foust said that London is one of the most important markets in Europe due to its strong commercial and financial sectors. 

The company, which is also building a new 10MW datacentre for Rackspace, has plans for more datacentres across Europe.

"We are delivering new datacentre facilities in London with this new site, but we are also full in Amsterdam, and are very keen to build there as soon as we can," Foust, said at the launch. "We are also looking at Frankfurt and have a new development site in Dublin, because we are almost full in that market. But London is certainly our biggest and most important of the European markets."

Foust said Digital Realty is also "looking very hard" at Osaka, in Japan, and is considering potential partnerships in China, though these developments are still very early stages.

He told ZDNet the demand for managed services and the need for large companies to move into outsourced infrastructure facilities to overcome the constraints of traditional in-house datacentres is leading to an increased need for retail datacentres offerings. "We are seeing the outsourcing trend really picking up steam, in particular around the datacentre world," Foust said.

"We are seeing a lot of companies in the financial services, energy, healthcare, consumer products now looking to outsource their facilities, and seeing a trend for companies consolidating different departments, especially in large corporations where every department would have had their own datacentre, often in a high rise office building. These are often very awkward places to have a datacentre and impossible to expand."