Colo-X’s Tim Anker made a prospective-customer site visit to Proximity’s new Edge 9 data centre in Bristol – a welcome addition to the list of regional UK data centres available through Colo-X.
For years I’ve wanted to see a data centre in Bristol become available to retail clients. It was therefore a pleasure to go and see the Proximity Edge 9 facility for the first time. I also especially enjoy visiting data centres when I have a prospective customer with me, so the 5-hour round trip from home was time well invested.
A Bristol data centre with a long history
The Proximity Edge 9 data centre is on Bristol’s Aztec West Business Park, right by the M4/M5 intersection to the north west of the city. It has quite a history. Most recently it was in use by Cap Gemini, who have essentially now become a tenant of Proximity. The same is the case on the sister site in Swindon, which is now Proximity Edge 7). But I believe that as this data centre was originally developed by Sun Alliance, the original build was to the demanding standards of a large financial services institution.
The site originally opened in the mid ’90s and was purpose built for data-centre use. It has a large upper-ground floor for the data halls and plant located directly underneath in undercroft. It covers a total of croud 90,000 sq ft of gross area.
The data centre is supported by a separate energy centre adjacent to the main building. This houses four dedicated transformers, dual and diverse incoming power feeds, and three Caterpillar 2.2MVA generators. There is approximately 4MVA of existing capacity at present, with most of this still available as Cap Gemini wind down their data-centre operations on the site. Historically, the site had List X status.
Some updating and refurbishment is needed but I imagine Proximity will be starting this process soon. There’s significant scope for expansion into a large area currently used as office space as-and-when needed.
Rear of Proximity Edge 9 data centre in Bristol showing the Energy Building adjacent to the main site
Limited retail colocation options for the South West, but plenty of wholesale capacity!
I’ve previously had to place clients in need of a South West colocation solution into data centres in Reading or Farnborough. These locations, which are really the western fringes of the London market, were the nearest alternative options for retail colocation buyers. I’ve also placed clients more recently over the border into Wales, where we have an excellent partner for smaller users.
Of course, there are two huge data centre campuses in this region. There’s the Ark’s Corsham (Wiltshire) campus at about 50MW, and the simply massive Vantage Newport facility (formerly Next Generation Data). I visited Vantage in June last year, and it is now about 70MW and still expanding. But the challenge has been that both these providers – as wholesale data centre operators – are totally focussed on selling huge volumes to the largest buyers.
For example, for Vantage, their biggest client in Newport is Microsoft. As a result, these sites are not that well suited to the smaller users that Colo-X works with. Hence my excitement at now being able to offer a Bristol data centre option!
Through a Colo-X partner, we’ll have full, half and quarter racks available in the Proximity Edge 9 site, all with network and support included as standard. This is the ideal combination for the smaller users we specialise in helping.
A growing market: regional data centres on the Colo-X data centre database
About a third of the enquiries I deal with each year are now for the regional UK data centre market. By ‘regional’ I mean away from London and the M25. So working with new operators such as Proximity is definitely expanding our range of options. This is especially so where their partners can add services such as network ports and local support that can be bundled together into an all-inclusive package.
In fact, Colo-X were probably the first successful referral partner for Proximity, putting two clients (with a combined total of 40kW) into their Nottingham site in the summer of 2021. We’ve had other successes in Manchester and Leeds over the past year, so I’m sure we’ll be doing more with Proximity and the other expanding list of regional UK data centre providers in the year ahead.
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