Slough, legendary for its dullness, is also Britain's data center capital, but it could have a rival in the equally humdrum Thames estuary town of Thurrock in Essex. A new data center there comes with a boost to fiber networks, and the company behind it reckons humble Thurrock could experience a data boom.

Real estate agent GVA says the newly built 50MVA Gateway data center in West Thurrock could unlock demand for space in the town, because it comes with new fiber links from Zayo Networks.

Thurrock, center of the universe?
The new connectivity from Zayo has put the site at the center of both pan-European and US fiber networks, and GVA says Thurrock could become the second major outer London data center park, and eventually rival Slough, which is located 22 miles outside Central London and houses data centers including Equinix and Infinity.

The Gateway centre is closer to town, on a 127,610 sq ft cleared site within Thurrock’s industrial estate, less than half a mile from London's M25 orbital motorway and 14 miles away from London City Airport.

The Gateway data center consists of a 2.3 hectare site designed to have 86,000 sq ft of white space with a gross internal floor area of 210,000 sq ft.

With up to 50MVA of power potentially available, the Gateway center is ideal for high density computing uses and is also located a few kilometres from the New York Stock Exchange’s disaster recovery and European Hub data centre in Basildon, Essex, GVA points out.

The Gateway Data Centre site has all necessary planning permissions and can be rapidly delivered as either, shell and core, powered shell or fully fitted to customer requirements. The site also has connectivity offered by BT, KPN, Vodafone, Level 3 and Fujitsu.

According to GVA Connect, GVA's data center arm, there are already plans for further data centers within the West Thurrock later being discussed.

GVA Connect director Charles Carden said: “we had already announced significant connectivity for the Gateway Data Centre in West Thurrock, but the potential of the Zayo dual redundant diverse routed fiber network into the equation is a total game changer for the area.”

The Zayo network is located within 50m of the site and passes through the East and North cable entry points.

The network offers a ‘diversely’ routed 432 cable which enables pan-European and US fiber networks for occupiers and network services including dark fiber, WDM networks, MPLS/ VPLS networks, VPN’s and Tier-1 IP services.

Zayo’s network routes to data center locations including London Docklands, Slough, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Dublin and the US.