Six Degrees Birmingham South, Studley Data Centre

Colo-X analysis

Originally opened under UKSolutions, the Six Degrees Birmingham South data centre is located 14 miles south of central Birmingham and offers a high quality if relatively small scale data centre facility with reasonable options for network diversity.  The South building opened in 1998 and the more modern North, twice the capacity of South, in 2008.

In 2014 with the facility almost at capacity Six Degrees leased a brand new state of art facility in the heart of Birmingham, now referred to as Birmingham Central (see Colo-X listing for Pure Data Centres ) with an initial 10,000 sq ft or 1.5MW of capacity available and significant scope for expansion, with Six Degrees being the sole and lead tenant.  With a broad portfolio of services Six Degrees now offer colocation and data centre services either on their own or as part of a wider customer solution.  See also the Six Degrees data centre in Greenwich for their London facility.

Six Degrees Birmingham South, Studley facility description

UK Solutions was acquired by Six Degrees Group in July 2011 having been founded in 1998 by Dan Lowe. The original data centre, the South building offers some 5,000 sq ft of net tech to support around 250 racks but at only light power density (by modern standards) of 2kW/10Amps per cabinet. The North building opened in 2008 and offers 10,000 sq ft of data floor space designed to offer 500 cabinet footprints at a higher density of 4kW/20Amps of power on average. The North building features hot-aisle containment pods to improve efficiency.

Network choice is now limited to three, BT, Virgin and SSE all of which are diversely routed onto the campus via network conduits.  Six Degree’s own network offers direct access to public cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.  The facility includes numerous accreditations including PCI DSS, ISO27001 and Official IL2/IL3 clearances.  The SLA on power is 100% uptime.

Technical stats