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.
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.
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.
In June 2024, we will be permanently retiring our London Central (NLC) data centre from active service.
This article will explain why this is happening, as we look to shift all active services across to our new London East (NLE) site.
Background
London Central has now been serving clients for nearly a decade. We welcomed our first anchor tenants to the facility back in 2015, having taken control of the shell in 2014, building what would become our flagship site and a landmark London data centre for the following 10 years.
After the wildly successful launch of our new London East facility in 2022, London Central now simply falls short of our exacting standards for data centre design and operation as we look ahead.
The reasons for closing London Central at this point in its life cycle are plentiful, but the most important are:
The site no longer meets our standards for efficient, sustainable data centre design and operation.
Some major infrastructure components are reaching end of serviceable life, requiring overhaul / refit.
Available site power can no longer support the increased requirements of client systems as we head into a new era of computing power.
While refit was an option we workshopped for a considerable period (until very recently, in fact), it would have still required completely gutting the site to bring it up to standard, and there are some aspects of London Central (namely available power in the area) that would still leave the site lagging behind our future capability requirements as we continue to expand operations.
More on our new standards for efficiency and sustainability
Our ongoing commitment to efficiency and sustainability formed a core component of the London East design journey, and has left the legacy systems at London Central lagging behind in every metric.
A view of the legacy CREC system servicing Data Hall 1 at London Central
The cooling infrastructure at NLC is our first-generation evaporative system, and while this has served our clients very well over the years, it is now legacy technology, and in the hottest days of the year it struggles to keep supply temperatures in-check. We have to bolster this with additional roll-in cooling in peak summer temperatures, which is highly inefficient, and represents a manual intervention process; something always best avoided.
The latest generation CRECs as deployed at London East
Despite London Central still performing at the very sharp end of global efficiency metrics – with a real-world PUE as low as 1.09 in 2022 – London East is set to achieve a truly exceptional PUE of just 1.05. It is this new level of excellence that we’re striving for across the board.
More on critical infrastructure maintenance
All critical infrastructure has a design life, and many aspects core to service delivery at London Central are now showing signs of age.
The in-row UPS system design methodology at NLC can be seen here during the early stages of fit-out
The UPS systems are now legacy models, and have seen out their design life, meaning they’d be due for a full replacement in the very near future. We are seeing a higher failure rate of internal components as a result, which has required a dramatic spike in maintenance actions in the last ~18 months.
Our diverse LV rooms form the beating heart of NLE, and are dedicated to housing our new modular UPS systems (alongside critical distribution and control systems)
A dramatic overhaul of the entire site would be required to bring things up to standard, both in terms of correcting core system age-out, and the fabric of the building itself, such as new wall and flooring systems to better match the deployment flexibility of our London East design.
Rather than investing very heavily in London Central to complete a full internal overhaul, the decision has been made to direct such investment into the continued development of our London East location, as it has far better underlying utility support to enable decades of future growth.
More on next generation computing requirements
As technology continues to develop at considerable pace, so too do the requirements of data centres to match the ever evolving needs and expectations of next generation systems and users.
Thanks in no small part to its centralised, primarily residential location, London Central suffers from a lack of available power in the local area. This hindered expansion of the site into the planned second data hall space on the ground floor, a space which could never reach its full potential as a result.
The compact electrical intake room at London Central suited the scale of the location, however it cannot be compared to the core power infrastructure deployed at London East
We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in higher density power requirements, for tasks such as AI, ML and GPU-accelerated computing. As such, London East has been designed from the ground up to cater for much more power hungry workloads, both in terms of average capacity and peak capacity.
The main switchboards at London East, as seen here in LV Room B – just one of these boards is many times the size of all the distribution infrastructure at NLCHaving our own on-site HV transformer infrastructure forms a central component of the power capacity level-up at London East
The increased capacity we have available to us at London East comes as a result of its very close proximity to a major substation (the same which powers the Telehouse Campus in Docklands), as well as a central location within Canning Town’s most major light industrial region, which has been designated with increased access to available power, in support of its economic impact.
In summary
London Central has been an incredibly successful location for Netwise, spring-boarding us from a 20 rack ‘proof of concept’ data centre right through to our new high specification campus-style site in Canning Town.
The lessons learned through the design and build of London Central have directly fed into the operation at London East. It exceeds London Central in every single metric, thanks in no small part to the evolution-ready DNA it has inherited from our previous build projects. With each iteration of our data centre design and implementation programme, we have taken enormous leaps forward; London East is no exception.
In summary, London East:
Is more sustainable
Is more efficient
Is more resilient
Is better connected
Has greater rack capacity
Has better customer amenities
Enables high power density deployments
Has improved in-house engineering capabilities
Utilises more advanced technology across the board
London East’s on-site customer amenities are industry leading
15 years of prior design and build experience has fed into London East, which is an enormous level up for Netwise, sitting comfortably as one of the highest specification data centres in London (and beyond), and one of the most efficient in the world.
While this has been in planning for quite some time, a final decision on timescales and logistics could only be confirmed and locked in very recently. We’ve given as much off-ramp as possible for this change to take place, while also factoring in the various interwoven factors that make up a large, complex strategic change such as this.
The future
Our future now sits firmly in the build out of our London East campus. We have plans to extend our current 224 footprint space to nearly 400 footprints in the next 12 to 24 months. Beyond this, we have early-stage plans that could see a localised campus with extension options of over 1,000 footprints. We’ll have more news on this in due course.
London East also has approved plans for on-site solar generation, as well as EV charging which is already available in the front compound / car park – both plans we wanted to see happen at NLC, but without the localised means to do so.
We grew by nearly 26% in 2023. No small feat for a company approaching its 15th birthday, and thanks in large part to what London East has brought to the table. This is why our future focus rests squarely on a site which can scale with us long into the future.
In addition, we are always on the lookout for acquisition opportunities to extend our private data centre estate into other areas in London and the surrounding regions. As sad as we will be to see London Central close its doors, we’re extremely excited by the prospect of welcoming new clients to London East, as we make this our highly-scalable new home for the next phase of our growth cycle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We look forward to sharing more exciting news with you as we head into 2023.
