Proximity Data Centres Edge 1 Nottingham

Colo-X analysis

Proximity Data Centres is a new provider for the UK data centre market, commencing operations in 2020 and the only specialist ‘edge’ focussed operator. They are aiming to open a string of 20 data centres across the country within 2020 and 2021 – a very short time frame. The company believe that a portfolio of 20 sites can be located to offer less than 15 miles distance from 95% of the population located outside of London, so ultra-low latency and 5G-related deployments will be one of their key selling points, ideal for edge applications.

The scale of Proximity’s ambitions should not be underestimated and they could easily become one of the biggest data centre providers in the UK regional data centre market. For example, if each site is 2MW, they could quickly account for 40–50MW of new supply in a market of that is only 150MW in total at present.

The Proximity sites have generally been built, owned and operated by large systems integrators who now have increasing volumes of spare capacity as legacy enterprise clients shift into cloud services. The Proximity model is that the existing site owner remains in situ but becomes a tenant. Thus all the new Proximity sites will already have decent occupancy from the outset with 2MW or so of spare capacity available (around 500 racks).

While a new operator, the Proximity management team have long-standing industry CVs from the data centre industry, telecoms and enterprise IT sectors.

Proximity Data Centres Edge 1 Nottingham facility description

Proximity’s Nottingham data centre is situated 4 miles to the north of Nottingham city centre on the Blenheim Industrial Estate, and 1 mile from the M1 motorway, giving easy access to road and rail. Originally constructed and owned by Siemens IT Services, the data centre was built to a high standard and used to deliver services to large corporate and government clients. The facility was acquired by Proximity in 2020 for conversion into a multi-tenanted data centre, with the original operator remaining in situ as an ‘anchor customer’.

The data centre comprises a two-storey steel-framed building located within 3.3 acres of land with secure perimeter fencing. The ground floor provides space for six data halls on a total floor area of 27,800 sq ft.

The site has a total of 4MW of available customer power, with 3MW currently built and the remaining 1MW scheduled for completion in 2021. This is supported via highly resilient dual-grid feeds backed up by six 2MVA backup generators.

Technical stats