e-shelter to develop one of the UK’s largest data centers in London

NTT Communications is to develop a new data center campus in the UK, through e-shelter, a subsidiary of NTT Com and one of the leading data center providers in Europe. e-shelter has now secured full planning permission which will enable work to start on the development of a new data center campus in Dagenham, East London.

The new campus will be known as “UK London 1 Data Center” (London 1) and is capable of up to 24,000 sqm IT space and 60MW IT load once fully developed. The project also involves Gyron, the NTT Com owned UK operator which is currently being integrated with e-shelter to create a combined pan-European operating platform.

London 1 will follow e-shelter’s successful business model – a flexible and scalable campus, offering both traditional wholesale and retail colocation and hybrid IT solutions to support customers from a range of market segments including Enterprise, Hyperscale, SAAS, Telco, CDN and Cloud.

The data center campus will also offer customers and partners access to the e-shelter Innovation Lab, a “try before you buy” test facility where customers, service providers and technology partners can collaborate, exchange ideas and trial and test solutions in a live data center environment without having to first make the significant financial commitment of purchasing.

Scalable connectivity and fibre infrastructure is being added to the site which is just 15km from London Docklands and will offer diverse dark fibre routes to London’s key internet exchange sites and will also be connected to the 5 existing Gyron data centers in Hemel Hempstead and Slough, creating a networked London operating platform of significant capacity and able to support over 100MW of IT load.

The decision to build the new data center in Dagenham represents significant investment in UK digital infrastructure by NTT Com, and will also help to regenerate the Dagenham and Barking Borough. A large-scale international expansion phase is underway at e-shelter as the 60MW capacity of London 1 joins ongoing construction projects in Amsterdam (40MW) and Frankfurt (60MW).

“We are delighted to have now received planning permission at our Dagenham site and we look forward to developing our industry leading data center campus there, which is the latest addition to our growing pan European platform,” said Rupprecht Rittweger, CEO of e-shelter and Gyron. “London is a major global data center market and this development is driven by continued demand from our customers and partners.”

Construction in Dagenham is expected to begin from November this year. Phase one, with an initial 8MW IT load, is targeted to be ready for December 2019, with five further phases planned to follow.