Brightsolid, the data center arm of Beano publisher DC Thomson, is to build a £5 million Tier III data center in the Aberdeen Journals newspaper offices.

The 2,200 sq m energy efficient site will be built on the company’s Lang Stracht site, one of several newspaper offices owned by DC Thomson. Better known outside Scotland for the Beano comic DC Thomson launched Brightsolid in 1995 as Scotland Online, and renamed it Brightsolid in 2008.

In Phase I, the data center will get 200 high density racks, with a power capacity of 30kW per rack. This will double in Phase II creating a site that can hold 400 Petabyte of data. It will operate with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.25.
 
Power and network
Aberdeen’s oil sector makes it a thriving business city, and the data center will have reliable energy and will have plenty of network connectivity, thanks to a recent announcement, according to Brightsolid CEO Richard Higgs, who described Aberdeen as the “energy capital of Europe”.

“We see our new state-of-the-art, Tier III Aberdeen data center as an opportunity to help position the city as a global tech hub by contributing to, and providing the means for, a growing digital economy across all sectors in the North East of Scotland ensuring continued growth in the region,” Higgs said.

The data center will be built by data center construction company Keysource, and a number of network providers will link it to local, international and international networks. 

Gigabit City
In September, Aberdeen gained network capability, as network infrastructure provider CityFibre announced plans to build a pure fiber network creating what it calls Scotland’s first “Gigabit City”.
 
The project - in collaboration with Scottish service provider Internet For Business (IFB) - will link 6000 companies and hundreds of public sector sites through 1Gb speed links that extend through the city.

“Its economic power, business makeup and absence of alternative network mean that Aberdeen will be in a position to take full advantage of this transformational digital infrastructure,” said CityFibre CEO Greg Mesch.