Equinix continues expansion efforts with UK data center deal
Two months after buying 29 of Verizon Communications Inc.’s cloud facilities for $3.6 billion, Equinix Inc. is expanding once again.
The infrastructure giant announced today that it’s taking over IO Data Centers LLC’s operations in the strategically placed English town of Slough, which sits 21 miles west of London. At the heart of the deal is a co-location facility that IO opened for business in 2015 with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. as its first customer.
According to Equinix, the financial powerhouse and the other clients that have since come aboard have rented about 350 server enclosures. The facility is set to have a total of capacity of more than 3,300 cabinets once it’s fully kitted out. Today’s acquisition announcement didn’t specify when construction will be complete, but did divulge that Equinix will continue using the proprietary Baselayer hardware modules around which IO originally designed the data center.
Even more significant for customers is that the company plans to link the facility with its existing co-location hub in Slough. The campus is home to three separate facilities and, according to Equinix, processes about a quarter of all equities trades in Europe. Connecting the two sites will enable clients from London’s thriving financial sector to exchange data with one another faster than they could before, thus speeding up transactions.
Moreover, IO users will receive access to Equinix’s high-speed international network, which can transmit packets from the U.K to Frankfurt with as little as 4 milliseconds of latency. This is useful not only for financial firms but also carriers and other organizations that need to move data across multiple countries in real time.
Today’s acquisition brings the total number of data centers that Equinix operates to a hefty 147. Its efforts to establish a bigger presence in Britain come as other industry giants likewise work to grow their local footprint. Amazon Inc. expanded its public cloud to the U.K. in December, while Microsoft Corp. launched three hosting facilities of its own a couple months prior.
Image via Wikimedia
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