Lunar Digital, Reynolds House, Manchester

Colo-X analysis

Lunar Digital acquired the lease on the former Equinix MA2 Reynolds House data centre in 2023 renaming the two suites as Lunar1 and 2.

Reynolds House is a long-established Manchester data centre and the building houses a couple of other data centre occupiers, with Lunar Digital’s suites occupying all of the first and part of the ground floors, now known as Lunar1 and Lunar2, reflecting that each suite has its own supporting infrastructure.

Lunar Digital is the third UK data centre venture from the same management team behind UKGrid (now Equinix MA4, previously acquired by Telecity in 2011) and LDeX (now part of Iomart and acquired in 2018). Given the age of some of the infrastructure and that this is a retro-fitted office building, power densities per rack are relatively light by modern standards, so the site tends to suit smaller colocation users, with a number of caged spaces offering end-users secure, flexible options.

Lunar Digital facility description

Reynolds House was originally opened as a colocation data centre by Internet Facilitators, IFL, in 2006. IFL were owned by the nearby University of Manchester and Reynolds House was their first large expansion project away from their campus. The opening of Reynolds House was well timed, with many local ISPs vacating London-based facilities due to rapidly rising colocation costs following the purchase of Redbus by Telecity in 2005.

IFL was then acquired by UK managed services provider Attenda in 2007 who then sold the business to Telecity in July 2010 for £21m by when the facility was offering some 1600 sq m of capacity or 1.4MW of client power. There was some irony in this given that many IFL clients moved from former Redbus London sites following the Telecity takeover. Telecity themselves were then bought by Equinix in Q4 2015.

Reynolds House was an existing building on Manchester Technopark, located just under a kilometer to the west from the University of Manchester’s main campus with a total gross space of 35,000 sq ft over three floors (ground, first and second). The first data centre phase in 2006 comprised some 250 racks/1MVA which was then expanded by a further 150 racks/5000 sq ft in 2008 taking it up to 17,000 sq ft.  Today Reynolds House offers around 22,000 sq ft of net technical capacity or about 500 rack spaces at power densities from 2kW up to 3.5kW.

Technical stats