The first of the three data centres planned in the United Kingdom will be interconnected to OVH’s point of presence in London through a double fibre path, increasing redundancy. Its proximity to two substations makes it possible to provide a high electrical capacity on site. Located less than half a millisecond from OVH’s point of presence (PoP) in London, the facility benefits from a direct connection to its data centres in Gravelines (then Roubaix and Paris), Amsterdam (then Brussels and Frankfurt), Montreal, and New York, through the fibre network that the OVH group has deployed worldwide to allow the lowest latency possible.
An operational data centre in six months
OVH’s first UK data centre will cover 4,000 square metres with no colocation space. True to its values of agility, the European cloud leader expects the data centre to be operational at the end of May 2017, first through its “Discover OVH” offers, then through its entire catalog. OVH’s expertise and end-to-end management of the web hosting chain has helped the rapid deployment of the data centre. This is aided by the very nature of the facility that formerly belonged to a telecommunications operator.
Three data centres in the United Kingdom
The two other data centres that OVH plans to set up in the United Kingdom will provide users with a backup solution: a second site on the outskirts of London, and a third one that is sufficiently remote to be a recovery site outside the failure domain of the two other sites. These three data centres will be interconnected, like the other data centres of the group, through the vRack, a private network developed by OVH to facilitate the deployment of multisite infrastructures.
OVH has had a presence in the UK since 2007, via a subsidiary based in London, and is located a few kilometres from the future data centre. The company has already attracted many British customers, including start-ups (like BulbThings, which aims to revolutionise asset management through data mining), and large accounts (such as Lineup Systems, a company that specialises in online advertising tools, and XTM International, an English leader in translation technologies).
An ambitious expansion plan
After announcing the opening of three data centres in Australia, Singapore, and Poland last October, OVH is continuing to invest in Europe. In order to fund its global expansion project, OVH completed a capital increase of ˆ250 million with two investment funds, KKR and TowerBrook in 2016. The company also announced a ˆ1.5 billion investment plan over 5 years. This will cover the construction of several additional data centres by the end of 2017 in the United States, Italy, Spain, the UK, the Netherlands and in Germany, where OVH has just acquired its first site near its PoP of Frankfurt.
At the end of its deployment plan, OVH will offer its customers —more than 1 million today— a choice of data centres in 11 countries, across 4 continents, all interconnected through its own network, with a current capacity of 7.5 Tbps.
