As part of a £7 million investment, a major expansion project has been completed at Datum Datacentres’ flagship Farnborough data centre (FRN1). The design and build activities were carried out by Keysource, a global critical environment specialist and Datum’s infrastructure partner. Since designing and building Datum’s Farnborough data centre facility, Keysource has been integral to all upgrade and development projects throughout its growth.
The new data hall, Hall 4, provides 380 rack positions, a cooling infrastructure for 1000kW of IT load with N+1 resilience, and a power infrastructure for 1000kW of IT load with 2N resilience. This extra capacity comes at a time when many companies are struggling to find data centre capacity due to the increase in demand for digital services, cloud computing and data storage.
Hall 4 has been designed to deliver efficiency and support net zero targets, including:
- The use of sustainable Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO) in the backup generators.
- An optimised cooling solution.
- Lithium-ion batteries in the UPS system for longer battery life and the removal of the need for additional cooling.
Datum became the Datum Group in 2022 with its acquisition of leading Manchester-based colocation provider, Teledata, as part of its regional expansion strategy. The completion of Hall 4 at FRN1 is a precursor to an even larger design and build project that will be commencing soon at its Farnborough and Manchester sites. FRN2 in Farnborough will provide 600 footprints on the ground floor with scope to double this capacity on the first floor. MCR2 at the Teledata site in Manchester will offer up to 1,000 new server racks.
Dominic Phillips, CEO of Datum, says, “We are pleased to be able to offer extra data centre capacity at a time when companies are struggling to find the high quality data centre footprint they need. We have proved since 2013 that our energy efficient, ‘service first’ colocation formula is a successful one, so we are delighted to be able to offer more of our services from our growing facilities.”
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