European News: Savvis Opens New London Data Center

The exterior of the Next Generation Data Center, a three-story building that supports 375,000 square feet of wholesale data center space. NGD was selected this week to host business software group UNIT4. (Photo: Next Generation Data)

Savvis expands to meet European demand, and Interxion and Next Generation Data record customer wins.

Savvis opens new London data center. Savvis, a CenturyLink (CTL) company announced the opening of a new data centre for the London metro market. The expansion to Savvis' operations in Slough, England, boosts the site's total square footage to 100,000, spreading 8.88 megawatts of power across the site's two data centers. The new LO5 data center features 35,000 square feet of raised floor space and will have an initial 2.4 megawatts of IT load. "The success of our existing data centre in Slough confirms that businesses view this area as a strategic geographic location," said Jeff Von Deylen, president of Savvis. "Our hosting portfolio in Slough allows businesses in the financial services, consumer brands and other verticals to benefit from Savvis' carrier diversity, interconnectivity and cloud services." LO5 is the fifth data center in the London area and sixth in Europe.

Cancer Research UK expands with Interxion.  Interxion (INXN) announced that Cancer Research UK is running all of its primary systems, including CRM systems, finance systems and Citrix virtualised desktops from its London data centre campus. Cancer Research UK said that Interxion was a part of its project to consolidate eight offices into one and move to a new thin client environment. Since the initial move the charity has also implemented VNX storage which replaced all the production storage for its virtualized desktops. “As a charity, our budgets are limited but our needs are increasing all the time," said Mary Hensher, IT Director at Cancer Research UK. "Not only did the Interxion team make the infrastructure work as hard as possible for us, adding a second smaller cool corridor that didn’t initially look possible, but their response time was incredibly fast. We know our data centre strategy is future-proofed. If we outgrow our current space, Interxion has a second data centre, LON2, on the same campus."

NGD selected by UNIT4.  Next Generation Data (NGD) announced today that it has been selected by global cloud-focused business software group UNIT4, to host the data the company stores on behalf of UK-based clients. To extend existing services and better meet UK legislative and operational requirements UNIT 4  selected NGD. NGD assures UNIT 4 and its customers with IL-3, ISO 27001 and PCI credentials, as well as operational SSAE16 accredited procedures.  “As UNIT4 drives to becoming the foremost cloud software vendor for businesses living in change, it is important that we build on the company’s reputation for secure, reliable and scalable hosting centres,” said Anwen Robinson, Managing Director of UNIT4 Business Software Ltd. “UK-based hosting in particular is crucial to the business as it is a major market for UNIT4. This deal will mean that in both the public and commercial sectors we can more easily meet local legislative and security standards. The selection of NGD as the home for our cloud solutions underlines the quality of its centre, personnel and supporting infrastructure.”