Pulsant Edinburgh SC-2 Medway

Colo-X analysis

Pulsant acquired Onyx in June 2016 for a rumoured £65m and with it five regional data centres clustered in Scotland and the north-east of England, including this one on Edinburgh’s Sighthill Industrial Estate.  The data centre is located only half a mile from the longer established Pulsant South Gyle site, formerly known as Scolocate, which Pulsant acquired previously in 2012.

Pulsant South Gyle is one of three Pulsant owned data centres serving the Edinburgh and Scottish market and the operator is the clear local market leader as a result.  This site offers 2MW of customer load for about 500 racks spaces.

Pulsant Edinburgh SC-2 Medway facility description

Pulsant’s Edinburgh Medway data centre came to them through the 2016 acquisition of Onyx which included five small, regional data centres including two in Scotland, this site and a second Scottish site in Glasgow which has since been closed by Pulsant.  Onyx had quite a strong focus on disaster recovery services, so their Edinburgh Medway site which was launched in 2009 would have been based around a mix of both data centre and recovery services, with an initial tranche of 200 desks provisioned here and would have originally been paired with their Glasgow based site.

The site was originally developed for data centre purposes by Telecity (acquired by Equinix in 2015) who subsequently closed it in mid-2002 as the business re-trenched post the dot-com boom and this was one of four sites they closed at this time.  Previously in August 1999 Telecity won a competitive tender to host the newly formed ScotiX – The Scottish Internet Exchange which was funded with public money via Scottish Enterprise.

Just under 300 racks of capacity in four data halls

Pulsant’s Edinburgh Medway data centre is located half a mile to the south of Pulsant South Gyle on the Sighthill Industrial Estate and the smaller Pulsant Newbridge (formerly Lumision) site is 5 miles to the west.

After a string of acquisitions ovee the past decade Pulsant now operate 12 data centres across the UK, ranging in size from 200kW to nearly 4MW and providing some 20MW of capacity in total.  Pulsant Edinburgh Medway is one of four that they operate in the 1-2MW capacity size. The company is now making much of their focus on “edge” colocation. Besides colocation (rack and power) Pulsant offer both network and full suite of managed services.

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