Canadian-based colocation, cloud and managed services provider CentriLogic has opened the first phase of a new data center development in the UK.

Its European market entry has been driven by compliance and regulatory demands being faced by the company’s global customer base, which includes ground handling company Menzies Aviation, 3D design software company Autodesk and printing solutions company Xerox.

CentriLogic CEO Robert Offley said many companies requiring services out of CentriLogic’s US and Canadian data centers (the company has two facilities in the states and three in Canada) are now requiring a European footprint for compliance and other regulatory concerns.

“Many of our customers are global brands,” Offley said. “They are Software-as -Service companies and others operating worldwide that are looking for mission-critical infrastructure for a European safe harbour and other compliance issues.”

Offley said he expects the company to grow its footprint in Europe, with expansion at its current site in Bracknell and new builds in the UK and mainland Europe in future.

The Bracknell data center is currently built at 5,000 sq ft but CentriLogic has space at its leased site to grow its footprint to 80,000 sq ft in future.

It is building out its data center in 5,000-10,000 sq ft pods to a Tier IV standard, according to Offley.

What makes its development unique, however, is its power density, with the facility supporting 6-9kW per rack at the higher end of the scale.

It receives its 2-3MW power feeds from separate hydroelectric power stations and has 2,1MW generators that supply power to the data center.

“There are not too many data centers using hydropower in the UK,” Offley said.

The data center was originally designed to be a corporate data center but CentriLogic has made a number of changes to bring the facility up to what Offley said is a Tier IV standard with 2N in all core systems, making it perfect for high-density operations.

At present, it is water cooled, with two 600kW chillers on the roof feeding 80kW chillers that supply cooling separate from the raised floor.

It has a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.5 at part load, but Offley said CentrliLogic is investigating free-air cooling and other technologies to make this much lower.