Almost a year has passed since Volta Data Centres took possession of the former Reuters/BT Radianz facility on Clerkenwell’s Great Sutton Street and the new 9.6MW, 1600 rack colocation facility is about to go live, with the first customer, Fusion Media Networks, a cloud based service provider, now installing.
Background to Volta and Great Sutton Street
Its worth mentioning that Volta’s Great Sutton Street site is one of the longest established data centre facilities in London and the UK; Reuters signed a long term lease on the building back in 1977 to turn it into their “technical facility” and since then it acted as bridgehead between the Reuters journalists on Fleet Street and Reuter’s clients based nearby in the City. This long history is of course a great advantage to Volta as seven carrier networks were already in the building; how unusual for what is in effect a brand new data centre to have seven networks on day one. With Level3 and the recently announced Custom Connect also confirmed the list has already grown to nine (the original seven are BT, C+W/Vodafone, Verizon, COLT, EuNetworks, Zayo and Geo). Certainly some of the manholes surrounding the site bear testament to its longevity; names long since disappeared such as Tanet (the original “London Carrier Ring” and now part of Level3), 51Degrees (Interoute) or Thus and Mercury (now Vodafone of course) can be found – a bit of telecom’s archaeology!
The building changed hands in 2005 when Reuters sold their network business, Radianz, to BT and since this time it was part of BT Radianz, the specialist financial services network arm of BT. Of course the problem BT had was inheriting a facility that was nearly 30 years old and in dire need of an upgrade – but how to do this and remain operational? A challenge BT felt unable to overcome, so they took advantage of a break clause in their lease to leave the building in June 2012. So it was in advance of this that Volta was formed specifically to take advantage of the opportunity to acquire a 90,000 sq ft building in central London with planning permission to be a data centre and with seven networks already in situ. Key to these plans of course was the ability to upgrade the incoming power supply – and Volta secured a new 9.6MW supply, delivered on a 33kV ring, increasing the site’s power from its original 2.8MW capacity. (Interesting fact: Volta’s 9.6MW supply is about the same as The Shard, a 1.2 million sq ft building compared with Volta’s 90,000 sq ft)!
Who are Volta?
Whilst Volta is a new team and new operator the company has both substantial backing and a team with significant industry experience.
Key Volta personnel include Matthew Dent, Chief Executive, currently of Glebe Asset Management (one of the two Volta funders) but formerly Matthew was a board member at both Chelsfield plc and Global Switch. Julian King, Commercial Director, was also Commercial Director at Global Switch. In terms of day to day operation Ashraf Khan, Great Sutton Street site Manager is former Sungard and Dean Green, GSS Operations Manager, was previously at Telecity.
In terms of funding Volta has impressive backers and is funded with £60m of all equity investment at this stage, coming from Apollo Global Real Estate (the real estate arm of Apollo Global Management LLC) and Glebe London Limited Partnership, a UK based real estate fund. Details of the funding can be found on the Apollo website: http://bit.ly/15EOppG. Volta awarded a £35m fit-out contract to Structuretone last August: http://bit.ly/1360xEi
What has the refit of Great Sutton Street delivered?
The first phase of the refit of Great Sutton Street involved the complete removal of the 35 year old data centre from the building which was literally stripped back to its concrete shell. Then from around Christmas time onwards a new state of art data centre has been built from the bottom up. The key feature differentiating Volta Great Sutton Street is of course the new 9.6MW power feed as it is delivered at 33kV, connecting to two grid supply points at both Finsbury Market and Back Hill, the first leg of which was energised back in March this year. Volta will have to lose both of the incoming supplies to fall back onto the generators, whilst the 33kV network itself is much less prone to issues than the more dispersed 11kV network. However, whilst the quality of the incoming main supply is terrific, Volta had the unusual challenge of housing a pair of 30 tonne, 33kV transformers which are now located in the basement of the building but crucially, are completely dedicated to Volta, so ensuring no other user can affect them. And beyond these Volta also houses five further dedicated 11kV transformers, making a grand total of seven dedicated transformers, all housed in the basement of the building, all for Volta’s sole use. The five 11kV transformers support three IT power strings, A, B and C and two mechanical load power strings, A+B.
Elsewhere in the building all the other usual feature’s you’d expect from a Tier 3 standard data centre are present, including an initial tranche of 3 x 2.5MVA AVK generator sets, 3 x 1.1MW Climaveneta chiller units on the new plant deck on the roof of the building, three Chloride Trinergy UPS systems (to support the A, B and C IT strings), as well as associated HV switchgear which is all Schneider throughout. Fire suppression is Argonite in the IT areas and a mist system in the non-IT areas. We thus have the foundations in place for a completely new, but very high quality colocation facility, yet opening in a site that has been around as a data centre for over thirty-six years.
First Phase is now going live
In terms of technical space Volta Great Sutton Street can offer 45,000 sq ft of net tech across four floors, or a total of 6.4MW across 1600 footprints (4kW on average therefore) is one possible deployment. However, with many clients looking at dedicated caged spaces the actual rack count may turn out less than this theoretical number. The first floor to be activated is the fourth floor, which can offer 300 footprints and 1.2MW of IT load. Further floors will be provisioned as occupancy grows.
Who will Volta Great Sutton Street appeal to?
Volta’s model as a high quality, premium colocation provider is to sell racks and caged space directly to end users. Crucially Volta also fully appreciates the importance of a deep and vibrant ecosystem as a key factor to allow this unique site to reach its full potential. Nine carriers are already onsite but this list will quickly grow and I suspect it will reach 15-20 within the next few months, thus offering customers a competitive environment for both wholesale circuits to other London data centres, local access tails to nearby businesses and managed Internet or transit connections.
When I take customers onto the roof of Volta (which is a great view by the way) it is easy to point out who the most likely customers are going to be: firms placed nearby in the City, mostly financial services of course but many other supporting businesses, the fast growing TechCity or Silicon Roundabout market – with Old Street literally 100 yards from Great Sutton Street and finally, the creative and media industry located in both Clerkenwell itself as well as Soho and the West End nearby. Volta Great Sutton Street really offers a high quality facility right in the middle of these three key communities.
If you are interest in Volta a site visit can easily be arranged, please don’t hesitate to contact me.