Prescient DC Northern Ireland

Colo-X analysis

Prescient Northern Ireland is the provinces’s first commercial, independent data centre and is a high quality, ultra-modern, purpose built facility closely located to the Project Kelvin landing station on the north coast, where a 22 miles spur to the GTT Atlantic (former Hibernia North) transatlantic cable system comes ashore, thus offering ultra low latency routes both to North America and mainland UK.

With the data centre opening in early 2019 users can expect a very high quality, Tier 3, ultra-low PUE facility offering direct connections to both GTT Atlantic as well as all local regional networks.

Prescient DC Northern Ireland facility description

Originally opened in Q1 2019 under the 5NINES name and renamed as Prescient Data Centres in September 2021, the site is a single story, ultra-modern, high quality facility designed Tier 3 standards to offer 6 data halls of 750kW or 204 racks each, a total of 4.5MW of IT load and 1200 cabinet footprints.

At the time of our most recent site visit in February 2020 the first data hall was in operation, Hall2 partially completed and the remaining four halls vacant space under the building envelope. Excool free-air coolers, generators and other infastructure are within a secure plant compound external to each data hall.

Each data suite offers 6 contained hot-aisle pods of 34 racks each. The location right on the edge of north-west Europe is of course highly conducive to a low PUE which Prescient have taken full advantage of.

The Prescient data centre is located about a mile north of the town of Coleraine and about 3 miles inland from the Northern Ireland coast, where the Project Kelvin spur of the GTT Atlantic system comes ashore. Belfast is 50 miles to the south, or about an hour’s drive away and Londonderry 30 miles westwards.  The facility is connected by dual and diverse duct routes to the Project Kelvin landing station about half way between the site and the coast.

Prescient offers direct connections to the GTT Atlantic (former Hibernia) cable system offering sub 60ms latency to North America and direct connections to the key carrier hubs on the UK mainland in Manchester and London over GTT’s network.  In addition, all local carriers are present, including BT’s Openreach, Virgin Media, Eir (formerly Eircom).

Reflecting the nascent local market Prescient are offering quarter and half-rack solutions as well as the more usual full height racks with standard power densities up to 7kW/32Amps or even higher (up to 25kW with specific configuration).  Dedicated caged areas can also be provided. Network services direct from the various carriers including competitive Internet for retail colocation users.

Onsite office space is available for customers and can be made available on a formal rental basis, with break-out zone (kitchen) available. Onsite security and support as you’d expect.

Technical stats