Documents released from the Greater London Authority today (http://bit.ly/X7eJVN ) confirm that Telehouse has secured two plots of land right next door to their long established Docklands campus on East India Dock Road and Coriander Avenue.
Securing yet further capacity expansion for the long term – the two plots are highlighted on the aerial image below.
Quarter of a million square feet possible and the Docklands colocation supply picture looking good
Telehouse recently opened their West building in March 2010 and are currently selling the fourth of five floors, each of around 10,000 sq ft each. Details of today’s announcement discuss buildings on the new land of 23,000 sq metres, or ¼ million square feet, but this is for both a headquarters building for KDDI as well as data centre, so the amount of data centre net technical capacity will be much less than this total area, I would guess somewhere in the region of 50,000 sq ft (same as Telehouse West) up to perhaps 100,000 sq ft.
This new Docklands capacity highlights the continued improvement and predictability of the data centre supply pipeline, even in the supposedly “constrained” markets like London Docklands. Whilst there have definitely been times in the past when the Docklands was literally sold out (2007/8 springs to mind) today the supply pipeline is much more visible and predictable.
For example, with Telehouse West adding 50,000 sq ft of net tech in March 2010, Telecity releasing up to 6MW, or 20,000 sq ft in their now interlinked facilities in Harbour Exchange (6&7 Harbour Exchange, the former Redbus site with 8&9 Harbour Exchange, the former Telecity site) and additional pockets of wholesale capacity out of the likes of Global Switch 2 (usually available via resellers) or even in Telstra’s London Hosting Centres and now of course, the new Telehouse East2 building (can’t think what they’d call it given East already exists), the supply picture in Docklands would appear pretty healthy for the foreseeable future.
Long term strategic win for Telehouse
Securing these plots is a significant strategic advantage for Telehouse as the new data centre building can clearly link in to the existing Telehouse campus, just as Telehouse West has been able to do so. To consider just how important this is imagine if Telehouse hadn’t been able to secure this land and to continue to expand had to go to another entirely new location – so not having any of the benefit of the 20+ years of network choice that exists on their Docklands campus. To give some ideas we find pricing per kW in facilities located around London, with limited network choice, is some 50% cheaper than the pricing we typically see in Telehouse and other Docklands based facilities. But its also worth remembering that for customers seeking access to multiple network partners, be it voice or data, then the price per kW is easily worth paying – provided of course you are only locating those kilowatts of equipment that need to be there and not hosting other kilowatts that could be located in other, much cheaper locations. This choice is very much a new feature of the data centre market, something that barely existed a few years ago, but now means that IT managers need to carefully consider the range of data centre choices available in the market today.
If you would like to discuss our experience of the ever increasing range of data centre options, please don’t hesitate to contact me.