UK-based data center operator Virtus has opened a 65,000 sq ft flagship facility in Hayes, West London.

The London2 data center – located just 20 miles from central London - has been designed to the BREEAM ‘Excellent’ standard and awarded Tier III certification by the Uptime Institute. BREEAM is an environmental assessment method and rating system for buildings, which sets the standard for best practice in sustainable design, construction and operation. According to Virtus, London2 is purpose built to be the most efficient in the capital and one of the most efficient in the world.

The data center is powered by renewable energy sources and claims to be the first in London to deploy indirect fresh-air evaporative cooling technology. This decreases energy consumption and brings power usage effectiveness (PUE) down to less than 1.2.

London2 offers customers 11.4MW of total IT load with power densities of up to 40kW per rack, N+N redundancy on UPS and N+1 on all other critical services. It is built in what is known as the ‘Goldilocks zone’, close enough to central London for low latency performance and active-active replication, but far away enough to meet government and financial services' continuity standards.

Virtus said London2 has already attracted five customers including existing cloud service providers C4L and Exponential-e, who are extending their ecosystems from London1 to London2.

The facility supports more than ten carriers, six of whom are fiber owners and operators – BT, Virgin Media, Colt, euNetworks, Zayo and SSE. London2 is strategically positioned between existing fibre routes running to the north and south of the data center.

London2 also provides customers with complete control of their colocated data center usage through the Virtus Intelligent Portal (VIP) – a free Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution for colocation customers. It allows clients to visualize and manage space, power, cooling and energy efficiency through a single 'pane of glass', either remotely or from one of the customer-dedicated offices or cafés in the facility.

The data center has six data halls which can be subdivided, allowing clients to have anything from a cabinet in a shared space to their own suite or data hall with dedicated power and cooling.

Virtus CEO Neil Cresswell said: “London2 highlights the growing appetite for intelligent, fully-optimized data centers in metro locations in the UK, close to large user bases for better application and content performance for today’s new digital economy.”

Cresswell said the welcome for London2 is ‘hugely’ encouraging as the company plans for its next facility, London3.