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A warehouse north of London is on the verge of completing its transformation into a datacentre
A lonely warehouse 10 miles north of London will soon complete its transformation into a 71,500-square foot datacentre.
Datacentre company Virtus has spent £35m turning the unit into a datacentre over the past three years.
The Enfield, North London development was completed in two phases, allowing the first tenant to move into the datacentre in March 2011, after phase one was completed. Today there are a total of seven tenants operating from the site.
The site is positioned for synchronous data replication to London locations — such as the City of London and Canary Wharf — with approximately 1m/s round trip latency.
Hosting provider ServerSpace is one of the latest tenants to move into Virtus' Enfield datacentre, offering services primarily to the media, software developers and online retail businesses.
Operating out of a range of datacentres provides ServerSpace with increased resilience.
"We wanted something out of London because it means we can offer clients a geo-diverse solution so there is more failover between sites," ServerSpace CEO Tim Dufficy told ZDNet, while on a tour of the datacentre. "It makes more sense to use datacentres far away from each other."
"Some clients will ask for two sites that are a certain distance apart from each other in case of something like a terrorist attack," he said.
For example, a leading hotel chain relies on a dual-site solution offered by ServerSpace for its European reservation system, said Dufficy. "They obviously can't afford for everything to be dependent on one site so that in the event of something happening at the primary site, all services fail over automatically to a secondary site so they can still continue to keep taking bookings," he said.
ServerSpace was unable to reveal how much it costs to operate out of the Virtus facility, but said it will hand over in excess of "seven figures" during its time there.
Image: Sam Shead
Caption by: Sam Shead
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