Global Switch London East

Colo-X analysis

Global Switch London East is a huge 11-floor purpose-built data centre of 450,000 sq ft of net technical capacity. It’s located right next door to Telehouse in East India Dock. The building is sold to a number of large-scale customers on a traditional leasehold basis, indeed Global Switch are unique in being the only carrier neutral wholesale focused data centre operator in central London. Customers include Google, Fujitsu, Claranet, Datapipe, as well as several financial services customers and enterprises. Power density is fairly light, at under 1kW/sq m.

This is a Google Cloud Interconnection facility, offering direct connection onto two Google Cloud Zones (lhr-zone1-47 and lhr-zone2-47).

Colocation space, on a per-rack or caged basis, is often available via the large tenants with spare capacity (often on attractive terms), or occasionally via Global Switch themselves. Sub-rack colocation, as 1/4 or 1/2 racks also available.

Global Switch London East facility description

At its launch in 2002, Global Switch London East was the largest purpose-built data centre in Europe. It offers 450,000 sq ft of net technical space across 11 floors, or 700,000 sq ft of gross space. As a purpose-built site, the building is perfect for data centre use. It has high floor loading and 5m slab height. As such, it will aim to be at least a Tier 3 standard.

Launching the facility well past the dotcom boom made the facility quite a tough sell in the early days. However, over time it has filled up. Tenants comprise a similar mix to Global Switch London North (next door) and include financial services clients, carriers and managed service providers.

One issue that has slightly hampered the site has been a relatively light power specification, at a standard 733W/sq m, but we believe an upgrade project is now underway as and when large suites are vacated by tenants and a retrofit can be undertaken.  Given the sheer scale of the building, this could offer a significant increase in overall capacity over time.

Technical stats