A look back at 2023

Another 12 months in the books, and another record-breaking period for Netwise, which we’re immensely proud to share with our clients and stakeholders as we look ahead to another equally exciting year.

As we step into 2024 for the first time this week, we’ll take a moment to look back and appreciate the year gone by; the first full year of live operation at Netwise London East.

The headline is that development works have continued at pace at our London East facility, as we prepare to bring Data Halls 3 and 4 online in early 2024, enabling our next phase of growth and expansion.

General
Engineering works continue at NLE

At the point of closing out 2023, we’ve pushed development works into all corners of our London East facility, with upstairs now fully deployed (Data Halls 1 and 2), and downstairs deployment underway (Data Halls 3 and 4). The site has been a hive of activity over the past year, and we have plenty to show for it.

Notable projects from 2023 include:

  • We fully deployed Data Hall 2 – the second active Data Hall within NLE welcomed its single long-term tenant in 2023; a major milestone for both parties. We enjoyed watching the space fill out with a wide range of cutting-edge hardware in Q4 2023.
  • Phase 2 works have ramped up – while we technically included the build of Data Hall 2 in the Phase 2 works schedule, the real meat of this phase comes in the form of Data Halls 3 and 4. These two new halls are being readied for occupation in early 2024, with the closing stages of 2023 seeing real traction in this area; Data Hall 4 now has its primary cooling system deployed, as well as much of the core electrical distribution infrastructure.
  • Josh Carvalho joined as Engineering Manager – in September, we expanded our team with the joining of Josh, our new Engineering Manager. Expect a full introductory post very soon.
  • NLC again exceeded its design PUE, reaching a remarkable 1.09 – back in 2022, London Central achieved a real-world PUE of just 1.11, beating the design PUE target of 1.12. In 2023, we managed an incredible 1.09. We’re extremely excited to see where we can get NLE as occupancy rates rise rapidly, looking towards the design target of just 1.05.
  • We added a range of niceties and features to NLE – we rolled out a range of new features at our London East site, such as on-site EV charging, recycling and general waste points, Dyson hand dryers throughout the building, improvements to lighting, additional Naturewall cladding; all of which we hope will improve customer experiences inside the facility.
  • Our next round of software development works began – in the closing stages of the year, we set in motion a wide range of software development works, including improvements to our customer portal (for power and bandwidth monitoring), an in-house IP management tool, and the roll-out of our own QR code check in system, the latter of which has been working well for us since its full roll-out in the summer.

The general focus over the past 12 months has been to expand into the current footprint at NLE more completely, moving from the initial deployment phase of a single hall, to making use of all four halls within the current building. We now have active works underway across every sector of the site.

London Central has also seen its fair share of input, largely in the form of ongoing maintenance operations, with activity across many critical systems. NLC is also now home to our significant stock of APC racks, which are being pre-staged there before heading to NLE for active service.

Beyond the exciting physical development works, we’ve posted exceptional financial growth metrics again in 2023, which will support our ongoing expansion aspirations, and of course contribute to continued rock-steady reliability for clients all around the world. Base revenues for the year grew by just over 30%, which for our fourteenth year of trading is something we’re extremely proud of.

UPS
Adding to our core power infrastructure over the past 12 months has certainly formed a main component of our ongoing expansion activities

We have some very exciting news to share about additional future expansion at London East very soon – enabling Phase 3 of development – taking us to new heights at our ever-evolving Canning Town address.

Netwise sponsors South Berkshire Hockey Club

We’re very excited to announce our position as the main shirt sponsor for the South Berkshire Hockey Club this year, as the new season begins in earnest.

It’s already been a competitive start to the year on pitch, with some solid results posted in just the first month of action; the Ladies’ 1st team is now already sitting in the top half of the league, having been promoted to the South Central Women’s Premier Division 2.

The Ladies’ 1st Team

The Men’s 1st team has had a slightly more difficult start to the season. The opening schedule has not been quite so kind to them and to date it’s been three competitive but fruitless games. However this is expected to put them in extremely good stead for their next set of fixtures, at which point the team is anticipating traction for the rest of the season.

The Men’s 1st Team

Our support of the SBHC has enabled an additional weekly Monday night training session, allowing their performance teams to push on in their new leagues, while keeping costs accessible to players in what has traditionally been known as an expensive/classist sport.

The Men’s 1st Team

Our Technical Manager, Nathan, is a long-standing member of the SBHC, which makes supporting them this year even more special for Netwise.

The club is renowned for its unwavering dedication to the sport, its inclusivity, and its exceptional track record in nurturing both youth and senior teams.

This new union between the South Berkshire Hockey Club and Netwise is a testament to our shared values and common goals, such as supporting local talent, enhancing community spirit, and aiming for success in everything we do, making for a perfectly aligned partnership.

Some of the Men’s 1st Team in action

With Netwise’s support, the South Berkshire Hockey Club is poised for a remarkable season. We are dedicated to upholding the club’s time-honored values of teamwork, sportsmanship, and dedication, and we very much look forward to sharing in their successes.

Sustainability in-focus: beating our design PUE figures for a second year running

We are very excited to announce that our London Central (NLC) facility has once again exceeded expectations in terms of energy efficiency. NLC’s design PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is an impressive 1.12, but the annualised real-world PUE for the last 12 months was a staggering 1.09 – an improvement over the already remarkable 1.11 achieved the year prior.

NLC is our facility in Bermondsey, London, which we opened in 2015

For those unfamiliar with the concept of PUE, it is a measure of how much energy a data centre uses for computing compared to how much energy it uses for supporting load, such as cooling, UPS losses, fire systems etc. The goal for data centres is to have the lowest possible PUE, as this indicates the highest level of energy efficiency.

Even just meeting our design PUE would be impressive for a London data centre, but to exceed this by such a significant margin is something we’re hugely proud of.

We have consistently demonstrated our commitment to sustainability and energy efficiency across all aspects of our operation. This latest achievement is a testament to our ongoing efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and promote sustainable practices in the industry.

A real-world PUE of 1.09 ranks among the lowest PUEs reported by data centres worldwide, indicating that the facility is operating with a high level of energy efficiency and with minimal energy waste.

We believe that data centres have a significant role to play in mitigating the impacts of climate change, and we are proud to be leading the way in this effort. Our innovative approach to energy management, combined with our state-of-the-art technology and cutting-edge infrastructure, has enabled us to achieve these outstanding results.

Furthermore, the design PUE of our latest data centre, Netwise London East (NLE), is just 1.05. Reaching a facility’s design PUE target does require a high level of capacity utilisation, which takes time following launch (though helped by our modular design and deployment philosophy), however we couldn’t be more excited to see where our real-world figures lands at NLE in the coming months and years.

NLE opened in 2022, in Canning Town, and is on-track to be one of the most efficient data centres in the world

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our team and our customers for their continued support. We remain committed to driving innovation and sustainability in the data centre industry and look forward to continuing to push the boundaries of what is possible.

A look back at 2022

As we head into another exciting year here at Netwise, we would again like to take pause in January to appreciate the year gone by. 2022 was another important year for Netwise, most notably for seeing live client services deployed inside of our new Netwise London East (NLE) data centre for the first time.

We also began development on Phase Two of the London East development cycle in the very same year, just six months after our first anchor tenant entered Data Hall 1.

Pod 2
Since launching with Pod 1 back in early 2022, a further 28 racks have since joined total capacity in Data Hall 1, taking the space to its 56 enclosure capacity

As seems to be the recurring theme for all Netwise annual retrospectives, 2022 again represents a huge year for us in terms of investments. We’ve continued with our build-out of NLE, following on from Phase One completion earlier in the year.

We’ve seen a fantastic range of new client installations across our entire estate, along with the continued expansion of existing client systems, as our roster of exemplary customers leverage their critical deployments to grow and thrive.

Notable projects from 2022 include:

  • We soft-opened NLE to client installations – without question, our largest single project achievement in 2022 has been the introduction of live client systems to Data Hall 1 for the first time. You can catch up with the build, from start to finish, on our Build Blog.
  • We deployed Pod 2, Data Hall 1 at NLE – almost as quickly as we got Pod 1 online, it was time to get Pod 2 deployed to keep pace with new installations at NLE. The containment system for Pod 2 landed with us in the summer, and saw the first new system installed in September, across seven of the 28 new enclosures.
  • Phase Two of development at NLE began – in the closing stages of the year, we made great strides towards the next stage of development at London East. Data Hall 2 will form the first part of this next phase, with the cooling and extraction pathways now cut into the fabric of the building.
  • Nathan Desmond joined as Technical Manager – in November, we expanded our team with the joining of Nathan, our new Technical Manager. Expect a full introductory post very soon, to do full justice to this very important milestone.
  • We expanded our European locations in Marseille and Amsterdam – we’ve deployed new systems in both Marseille, FR and Amsterdam, NL, as we continue to support international clients with their pan-European installations. This takes our global spread of live deployments to 15 locations around the world, from our five PoPs in London, to as far away as Kuwait and Singapore.
  • NLC exceeded its design PUE, reaching an impressive 1.11 – our London Central facility officially beat its design PUE of 1.12 in early 2022, achieving a real-world annualised PUE of just 1.11 across 12 months. That makes NLC one of the most efficient data centres in the UK (and the world), particularly when coupled with our wider sustainability measures, such as our exclusive purchase of 100% renewable energy. In fact, our own London East facility will likely be the only data centre in the UK to beat this, with a design PUE of just 1.05 – a truly impressive figure.

As is clear to see, 2022 has certainly been dominated with all things NLE, following the soft-opening in May, and the continued investment in the space as we expand into our newest facility.

This doesn’t mean that our London Central facility (NLC) hasn’t seen its fair share of developments alongside, with some key monitoring upgrades deployed onto our generator system, amongst other minor upgrades and improvement works. With NLC running at near-capacity, it’s fantastic to see the natural efficiencies that come with taking a facility to its true design capabilities, a position many data centres rarely reach.

From a wider perspective, we’ve enjoyed another brilliant year in terms of growth, which is driving our rapid expansion into all corners of the new data centre. We pride ourselves on our stable, predictable growth trajectory, which is how we maintain our rock-solid reliability for clients around the world.

2022 also saw unprecedented changes in the global energy market, resulting in a noteworthy upswing in wholesale rates. This has been felt across both domestic and commercial sectors of the market, and has certainly been the most difficult aspect of the year to deal with. The future is still uncertain, however we are seeing positive indicators in the wholesale market which point towards more stability in 2023, which we’re very much hopeful for.

We’re looking ahead to a very exciting year in 2023, as we continue to develop NLE (with be the deployment of Data Halls 2, 3 and 4), and even begin exploring options for campus-level lateral expansion to maintain our ever-important growth ambitions.

Pod 1
We look forward to sharing more exciting news with you as we head into 2023.

Phase 2 of development begins at London East

In late August, works began full-force on Phase 2 of our London East data centre build project.

While we won’t be publishing a Build Blog to the same degree as Phase 1 – the forthcoming modular roll-out of additional capacity will be less technically involved (and perhaps interesting) than the front-loaded primary build – we are still going to document this process, and put out updates as things progress.

Phase 2 will predominantly focus on two areas of expansion at London East; the deployment of Pod 2 in Data Hall 1 for an immediate capacity boost, and the full deployment of Data Hall 2, for mid-term growth enablement.

This phase is less time-sensitive than the initial build, and will likely be a split development phase as works continue in other areas, including our Build and Break Room and our new personnel lift, both coming in October.


Updates

We’re now a couple of ‘split weeks’ into Phase 2, and have some initial visual updates to share with our readers.

Roof
The first major works as part of Phase 2 involved the addition of the roof extraction cowls over the top of what will become the cold corridor for Data Hall 2
Roof
This is the view from on top of the roof, with the seven extraction cowls nearest being the new additions for Data Hall 2, and the seven furthest away being the active service cowls for Data Hall 1
Roof
These cowls allow for exhaust air to be extracted to atmosphere, if not required for any recirculation purposes – our new roof fall-arrest system can be seen in the foreground here, installed this summer
Roof
The new cowls are an exact copy of those servicing active loads in Data Hall 1, allowing for the weatherproof venting of hot exhaust air
Materials
There are a lot of materials and components which go into each data hall – the duct sleeves seen here are for the eventual 28 intake louvres to be cut into the rear of the building for the forthcoming second data hall (of four in this building)
Shipment
The components to make up another three of our containment pods arrived to site this week, allowing for the deployment of another 84 racks across halls 1 and 2
Floor
We’ve also added a couple of other niceties to the facility as part of this phase – here we can see our custom engineered glass floor tiles, which we’re placing in strategic locations to show off the quality of our sub-floor fit-out
Floor
Here are another set of these tiles in the main stairway atrium, showing the large trefoil runs between LV rooms – these will all be lit in due course, to make this even more of a feature

We’re extremely pleased with developments so far, despite being early into Phase 2. It is a phase of work which is expected to take us into next year for full realisation, however it will complete in stages. For example, the deployment of Pod 2 in Data Hall 1 will come first, and will be a relatively fast process, as this simply requires the physical construction of the containment pod and the integration of some monitoring and operating systems. The supporting infrastructure is already in place, with no required additions at this stage.

The deployment of Data Hall 2 is a larger operation, as this still requires lots of work under the raised floor to make the space ready for power and connectivity.

We’ll be posting updates to this process as and when suitable progress is made.