Kao Data expands Harlow Campus

Kao Data is expanding its Harlow data centre campus, with construction now underway on its second 10MW facility, underpinning infrastructure in the UK Innovation Corridor.

Following the recent investment from Infratil Limited, and the launch of its Slough data centre last month, the new facility, named KLON-02, will build upon the company’s high performance infrastructure, energy efficiency and sustainability capabilities; providing customers with a reduced carbon footprint and low total cost of ownership (TCO) over the lifecycle.

KLON-02 will offer up to 10MW of capacity and provide an energy efficient home for almost 1,800 racks of IT equipment across 3,400m2 of technical space and via four Technology Suites. Once fully operational, the facility will be NVIDIA DGX-Ready data centre certified and OCP-Ready™, enabling high performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), and enterprise computing users to scale quickly and efficiently by deploying pre-populated OCP Accepted™ racks, or bespoke high density architectures within its hyperscale-inspired design.

In similar fashion to KLON-01, the new carrier-neutral data centre will benefit from access to resilient, low-latency connectivity via major multiple networks including BT Openreach, euNetworks, Jisc/Janet, the London Internet Exchange (LINX), LUMEN and Vorboss. Furthermore, Kao Data's continued partnership with Megaport will deliver high-performance connectivity to all major Tier I and Tier II cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud.

Central to the design and build of KLON-02 will be the highest sustainability features, from ensuring the new architecture is BREEAM ‘Excellent’ certified and both its Technology Suites and related cooling infrastructure configure to hyperscale design principles, to ensuring customers’ mission critical workloads are delivered with an SLA-backed PUE of <1.2. These will be complimented by using 100% renewable energy and 100% sustainable, hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) in its backup generators.

“The expansion of our Harlow campus is another strategic milestone in Kao Data’s evolution as we continue to scale the business’s high performance data centre offering across the UK and Europe”, said Lee Myall, CEO, Kao Data. “With our second 10MW facility in Harlow following the launch of our 16MW data centre in Slough closely, Kao Data is bringing advanced colocation capacity at industrial scale to the west and east of London.”

“KLON-02 will build on the award-winning design and build principles of our KLON-01 facility, offering greater efficiencies for our customers’ colocation environments,” added Paul Finch, COO, Kao Data. “It’s exciting to be able to continue to innovate within our construction, engineering, and technical principles, and I am confident our second facility at Harlow will raise the bar again for sustainable, energy efficient data centres.”