SAVVIS UK Ltd, part of SAVVIS, Inc., will open a new datacenter during the early fourth quarter of 2008 in response to strong business demand for more space, power and managed IT services within the UK.
The datacenter in Slough, Berkshire is part of a $400 million global investment that SAVVIS, a leader in managed IT infrastructure services for business and government applications, has made into new facilities and its network across Europe, Asia and North America over a two year period. The datacenter will enable extra capacity for new business, whilst providing additional services for SAVVIS' existing customers that are predominantly based in the financial services, legal, media, entertainment and retail sectors.
As an integral part of its UK expansion plans, SAVVIS has chosen to locate the datacenter outside the M25 and closer to the grid, to overcome technical infrastructure, space and power challenges often associated with central London facilities.
As the facility will have direct connectivity to SAVVIS' datacenter near Reading and in London's Docklands, it will provide additional business continuity and disaster recovery for customers who want to duplicate their data in more than one UK location. International customers may also take advantage of the new datacenter for their UK operations and global business continuity strategy. The new datacenter will cover 36,500 square feet of raised floor space with the capacity to add approximately 30,000 square feet of additional raised floor space in the future. This will provide SAVVIS' customers with access to a full portfolio of technology agnostic managed hosting and network services, including colocation, virtualisation, utility computing and managed security services. Customers will also be able to take advantage of SAVVIS' new Application Transport Network (ATN), which enables optimised network performance, scalability and delivery.
As security is one of SAVVIS' key priorities, the datacenter will have 24x7 advanced robust physical and logical measures to protect customers' IT infrastructure. Defence measures in the new facility include ballistic-proof glass, weight-sensitive entrance floor panels, man traps' and biometric scanning.
The Slough datacenter design is based on the same proven methodology and technology model as SAVVIS' four most recently built datacenters in the US. This build cannot be declared ready until every component of the construction has passed rigorous testing and security standards.
"Over the past five years, SAVVIS' European hosting business, predominately managed hosting, has grown at a compound annual rate approaching 60 percent. This new datacenter will provide sufficient capacity to accommodate the growth requirements of existing and new customers over the next five years, said Richard Warley, International Managing Director for SAVVIS.