Virtus LONDON2, Hayes

Colo-X analysis

Virtus’s second London data centre opened at the end of 2014. Thanks to a strong wholesale market, by the end of 2016 it was almost fully sold to several large scale customers, including T-Systems. Customers also include large hyper-scale cloud providers. Some smaller-size capacity might still be available for clients wanting a high-quality data centre in this part of Hayes.

Virtus are one of the fastest growing UK data centre operators with a particular focus on large scale solutions of up to 28MW to large or “hyperscale” tenants and now operate 11 facilities in London, many of which sold to single tenant occupiers.  Some smaller scale retail sized capacity (racks, cages, pods) is available either directly or via service providers.

Virtus LONDON2, Hayes facility description

Virtus secured this 2-acre brownfield site at Trade City, Western International Park in Q3 2012, together with an option on a further 2.2 acres.  The original design was to deliver 64,000 sq ft of net technical capacity using Direct Fresh Air cooling across a modular build scheme at 1.5kW/sq m and a design PUE of 1.25.  The new building offers 2 floors of IT and one of plant. 20MW of power is delivered from the SSE North Hyde substation located about half a mile away.  The ground floor offers two distinct data halls, each of 5,600 sq ft and 650kW of IT load with four halls of 6,600 sq ft each or 1MW each of the first and second floors. Total IT load of nearly 12MW over ten data halls.

Extremely high quality fit-out in a modern industrial building offering six large data halls. Low PUE driven by use of indirect fresh air evaporative cooling. Secure 5m high perimeter fencing.

Formal Uptime Institute Tier 3 design certification.

Virtus are one of the fastest growing UK data centre operators, with 11 massive facilities either open or under construction in the London market providing a combined 175MW or 850,000 sq ft of net technical capacity.  Their primary focus today is the 8 data centres in West London, with four of a combined 84MW in Stockley Park (LON5, 6, 7 and 8) and five on the Slough Trading Estate offering 75MW (LON3, 4, 9, 10 and 11), with the original small 4MW site in Enfield LON1 and LON2 in Hayes.  Virtus became a wholly owned subsidiary of ST Telemedia in October 2017, an investment vehicle of the Government of Singapore.

Virtus have had enormous success in the booming demand from hyperscale cloud providers that has arisen since 2016 and most of their recent developments are believed to have been leased on a single tenant basis to these large scale users.

Technical stats