The re-emergence of the datacenter space race, after the dot com bubble

The last six months have seen continued expansion of datacenter space in Europe, with much of the growth coming from the established markets in the UK, France, the Netherlands and Germany. The degree of the increase can be seen from the effects of the Datacenter Price Tracker, where average carrier neutral space per rack has increased from 776 euro per month (July 2008) to 865 euro per month (January 2008), an average price increase of 11.5 per cent over the last six month period according to price tracker Tariff Consultancy.

The growth in pricing is now been reflected in new datacenter space being developed, first by the carrier neutral datacenter, and now by the Carrier Based telecoms provider. In Berlin, E-Shelter are developing - in stages - a 15,000 square metre facility and are planning a 7,500 space on their existing 60,000 square metre Frankfurt campus. The facility is aimed at large client who wish to outsource their entire IT centre to a carrier neutral site without having to develop their own datacenter. Global Switch has also announced its first datacenter build in Paris since 2001 with a new 8,000 square metre build out.

In the UK, Sentrum has developed a similar market niche with new datacenter under way at Woking, and Digital Realty Trust with sites under development at Welwyn and outer London (at the Foxboro Business Park). COLT Telecom has also opened their 5th datacenter outside the London M25 ring road. The attraction of new datacenter development was underlined on March 22nd when Japanese carrier KDDI Corporation announced that it would be devoting $243 million USD to building new datacenters in the UK, France and Singapore by 2010. This will be its first new development in Europe for more than 5 years.