European cloud and colocation provider Interxion is planning to build two data centers in Shoreditch, East London, to complement its existing facilities on Brick Lane.

Managing director of international business Douglas Loewe told DatacenterDynamics that the UK government’s efforts to grow its own Silicon Valley (affectionately known here as ‘Silicon Roundabout’) have been successful, and customers are really choosing to host their data in this trendy neighborhood.

The land of beards and smoothies
Interxion operates more than 30 data centers across 11 European countries, two of them in Central London. The company has recently submitted planning applications to Tower Hamlets Council for another two, in order to meet the demand for colocation space.

Even though Interxion describes itself as exclusively European, the majority of its customers are American businesses that are looking to establish a “beachhead” on the continent.  According to Loewe, there are three main drivers behind this trend.

“The first driver is performance. Even though applications travel quite quickly down the wires that crisscross the Atlantic, the reality is – because they have to go through lots of router hubs – if you don’t have your application resident in Europe, it will not perform as well.

“The second driver is data privacy. Not only do you need to have these applications in Europe, but you need to have them distributed. Because French data needs to be in France, and German data needs to be in Germany.”

The final driver is the specter of government surveillance. “When our friend Edward Snowden revealed what the US government was able to get its hands on and what it was doing, it drove the need to get data out of the US even faster. That’s why we’ve had these accelerated builds,” explained Loewe.

John Souter, CEO of the London Internet Exchange (LINX) who was present at the same briefing, added that the UK remained very London-centric, and this also applied to broadband networks.

“We have a radial system of roads coming out of London, and that of course has influenced tons of things ever since. Sadly, we missed the point where the UK could have had a more distributed fabric of networking, and what we’re trying to do now with our regional peering policy is redress that balance a little bit,” said Souter.

In May, LINX located its first Core Node outside of London Docklands at Interxion’s Shoreditch campus. And last month, it launched the first dedicated Internet exchange point in Wales.

“The companies that we’re talking with now are some of the coolest logos in the world,” told us Loewe. “That’s one of the reasons I selfishly took on an international role – these companies are joining the Interxion family and also choosing London as their hub for either network nodes or mini-compute nodes.

“In the 20 years I’ve lived in Europe, I’ve never seen activity more pronounced than now.”