An exterior view of the Next Generation Data Ltd. facility in Newport, Wales.
A huge new data center in Wales has unveiled its first two tenants. Next Generation Data Ltd said Friday that BT and Logica will occupy two large data halls at its NGD Europe facility, which at 75,000 square meters (750,000 square feet) is one of the world’s largest data centers. Build outs for both clients were completed in less than 16 weeks, despite challenging weather conditions during late December and early January.
“Making these halls ready in record time for BT and Logica was largely down to excellent planning and project management by our resident and highly experienced operations team, the calibre and professionalism of our chosen infrastructure partners and sheer hard work by all concerned,” said Simon Taylor, Chairman of Next Generation Data.
BT is deploying hundreds of server racks at NGD Europe to deliver increased capacity for IT and communications services for its business customers in the UK and globally, while Logica is using the facility to help manage the IT requirements of its government clients.
"We are already preparing two further custom halls for client occupation very soon," Taylor added. "Demand for space at NGD Europe is growing fast from corporate, government and cloud computing organisations which are fast realizing that our out-of-town facility offers them much more scale, power, resilience, connectivity and security at far less cost compared to the traditional data centre locations in London and the South East."
Next Generation Data announced in November that it had secured “significant” debt financing from a unit of the Royal Bank of Scotland to complete tenant space in the huge data center in Newport in the south of Wales. The huge facility was previously used as an LG semiconductor plant, but has been empty since it was completed in 1998. NGD is converting the site into a three-story data center facility that will feature more than 375,000 square feet of technical space, enough capacity for more than 17,000 cabinets of servers and storage.
