A look back at 2020

What a difficult year 2020 has been for everyone around the world.

While this year will certainly stand as one to forget for many, we’re going to remember 2020 for a long time, as a year of extremely exciting developments here at Netwise.

A look back at 2020

This has been our largest year of investment to date, having broken ground on our brand new London East data centre back in April. Unsurprisingly, this is by far our biggest single project to date, and will provide the capacity we need to continue with our upward growth projections as we head into the new decade.

While NLE has taken centre stage this year in terms of investment and development, it’s been a busy year aside to this, across a wide range of key areas.

Notable projects from 2020 include:

  • We started work on London East – we started work on our brand new London East data centre in April. We’ve been running our Build Blog ever since then – needless to say, we’re very excited about what 2021 will have in store for us and our new site.
  • Graham Cornell joined as Technical Manager – Graham joined as our new Technical Manager in January, and has been hard at work helping our growing roster of clients ever since.
  • THN became our first Supernode – in March, we upgraded our core node in Telehouse North, becoming the first on-net site to enjoy the roll out of our full Supernode architecture.
  • We added CLL to our POP list – the summertime saw the roll out of a brand new on-net POP / node at City Lifeline, one of London’s most important carrier-dense facilities – we took a pod of racks here, to secure our future in this location.
  • We took delivery of our first fleet vehicle – our first fleet vehicle joined us this year – number 001 – which has since received our full livery and chevron kit. This will be joined by further vehicles in due course, and makes the ongoing operation and maintenance of our multiple facilities much easier (along with client migrations).
  • We expanded into FRA and AMS – we’ve expanded our presence in Frankfurt, and have entered the Amsterdam market for the first time, all driven by client growth in these key European locations.
  • Our first private cage went live – we deployed our first private client cage at our London Central site in Q1, allowing one of our key clients to enjoy an entirely private space in Data Hall 1, complete with their own access control and build desk.
  • COVID-19 safe operations – in line with changing government guidelines throughout the year, we’ve always ensured fully-compliant operation of our sites, both in terms of our own team, and visiting clients.

Beyond the roster of notable projects above, we’ve also performed extremely well in our 19-20 financial year, which came to an end in October. Despite global economic issues resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re fortunate to operate in a sector which has seen accelerated growth and demand as organisations move to remote working.

We hope that our continued growth in what has been a very turbulent year provides the stability our customers need to operate with total peace of mind, thanks to the faultless operations of critical business systems around the clock.

We helped many new and existing customers pivot to fully-remote working environments back in April, which we’ve continued to do throughout the year.

Our growth this year has been testament to our rock-solid operation, which our clients continue to rely on for their critical IT infrastructure. We’ve been extremely proud to see so many of our clients continue to grow this year, providing world-class services to millions of end-users all around the world.


Looking ahead

We’re looking forward to 2021 just as much as everyone else, not least as we expect to return to a more normal home life, but also as we see the fruits of our labour this year come into full service.

In early 2021, we’ll be adding to our team, which we’re very excited to share with everyone in January.

A reminder of our exciting 10th birthday, which we celebrated at the end of 2019

We’d like to wish all of our stakeholders a fantastic New Year, and a prosperous 2021. We look forward to sharing it with you.

Announcing our new London East data centre

Today we are officially announcing plans for the opening of our brand new London data centre, set for launch in 2021.

The state-of-the-art 13,000 square foot facility will be named Netwise London East (NLE), and will join our existing estate of private and partner on-net data centres next year.

A preliminary facility page is now live on our website.

Exterior front elevation
Exterior front elevation

While we’re not releasing a full technical specification just yet, we can say that this will be a 1.5MVA build, housing up to 256 rack footprints across four data halls.

This will be the third private design and build project in our 10 year history, having completed our first small-scale London South build in 2011, and our 11,000 square foot London Central facility in 2016. The new site will interconnect with London Central, as well as primary points of presence across our growing metro network.

We will continue to push focus on hyper-efficient technologies, opting again to deploy an evaporative system for primary cooling, enabling a design capacity PUE as low as 1.05 – one of the lowest for a colocation facility anywhere in the world.

All energy will once again be purchased from entirely renewable sources, to match energy commitments at our existing London Central facility.

This will be inner London’s first new data centre for several years, continuing the trend of capacity growth inside the capital. We are one of just a small collection of independent facility and network operators investing this heavily in the city’s technical infrastructure.

This announcement comes off the back of a 12-month planning and design cycle, which involved several site options and design iterations being put through their paces. It’s incredibly exciting to finally reach the point of publicly announcing London East, and to break ground on what will be a long but very rewarding build phase.

Matthew Butt, Managing Director

London East will give us private coverage over another of London’s key data centre hotspots for the first time. The new facility is just a short distance from the large Telehouse Docklands campus, which stands as one of Europe’s most important interconnection locations.

This will also be our first foray into carrier neutrality, with NLE being the first of our privately-operated colocation facilities to welcome third party network operators into the fold. While clients will still enjoy access to our wide array of connectivity options, they’ll also be able to connect in with their own carriers on-location for the first time.

To say the entire team at Netwise is excited about the new facility is an understatement. Building bespoke data centres is what we do best, and what has enabled us to grow in the way we have, delivering a range of services to our customers that you simply won’t find anywhere else. London East will again take us to the next level in terms of capability and capacity, just as London Central did back in 2016.

Matt Seaton, Senior Manager

We have several key anchor tenants already in early discussions regarding space options at the new site, however details are being kept highly confidential.

We will be resuming our much-lauded Build Blog throughout the course of the project, detailing developments as works progress throughout the year.

Hard hat tours will be available in small numbers each quarter. We advise interested parties to request more information on when these will be available through the ‘Book a Tour’ function on our website.

Supernode core network upgrade

Just as quickly as the new year begins, investment continues in earnest as we roll out our brand new Supernode core network architecture, enabling enhanced 100Gbps+ capabilities across our metro network.

Our core node in Telehouse received the steroid treatment mid-March, upgrading to a much larger ASR chassis, providing further interconnection capacity as we maintain the steep upward growth trajectory of our network. Telehouse now functions as our first on-net Supernode, handling masses of fibre connections that mix in and out of our multi-site network.

You can take a look at a compressed time-lapse of the upgrade work being undertaken here:

Beyond the full node rework in Telehouse, all on-net nodes have received line card upgrades that enable the enhanced operational capabilities we require as we head steadfast into 2020.

Looking further ahead, we’re also adding a brand new core POP to our metro network in Q2 2020, which will be officially announced in a few weeks. This will further increase our on-net capabilities as we gear up for what will be the largest evolution in our service offering since launching the London Central data centre in 2016 – more on that very soon!

Graham Cornell joins Netwise

We’re very excited to introduce you to the latest member of the growing Netwise team. Meet Graham Cornell, our new Technical Manager.

Graham has actually been working with us for some time now, forming part of our Technical Support team (namely our Data Centre Supervisor). Any regular visitors to our London Central data centre will have very likely had the pleasure of meeting Graham at some point in time.

Graham has a long history working in the data centre industry, having spent 6 years with Pulsant, and formerly holding a position with Telecity in the early years of their development cycle.

Graham’s promotion to Technical Manager comes as Netwise enters the next phase of its growth journey, making this role extremely important to the ongoing operational success of the organisation as upper managerial focus shifts to the next chapter in our development cycle.

Graham will oversee the technical operation of our facilities, working closely with Alex, our Facilities Manager, to keep client-facing services and internal infrastructure operating flawlessly around the clock. This will also extend to project work, developing new innovative systems and technologies to aid future growth.

A look back at 2019

As should always be the case for any growing enterprise, this year has unquestionably been our most successful to date. Here’s a look back at the year gone by; 2019 at Netwise.

Investment continued unabated this year, in line with our steadfast approach to ongoing improvement across all aspects of the organisation. This includes works in both customer and non-customer facing areas, to ensure our London Central facility remains the premier choice for world-class colocation services in the capital.

We’ve also seen the greatest level of growth we’ve ever experienced in the on-boarding of new client projects, across both new entrants to our facilities and network, alongside the impressive continued growth enjoyed by our existing customers.

Notable projects from 2019 include:

  • Deployment of Pods 4 & 5 – we took Data Hall 1 to 100% available capacity this year, with all five containment pods now online and servicing an exciting range of new and existing customers.
  • Generator system expansion – in-line with growth experienced in our technical spaces this year, we undertook a major upgrade of our backup generator systems to ensure we maintain power delivery resilience as we continue to fill out our London Central facility.
  • We rebranded – in the summer, we rebranded, dropping the ‘Hosting’ portion of our name and drastically evolving the look and feel of our organisation, to better suit our current position in the market.
  • We turned 10! – this December, Netwise officially turned 10 years old, having incorporated in 2009. We celebrated in style at Swingers West End, with a wide range of customers, suppliers, family and friends!
  • GitHub partnership – this year, we announced an exclusive and unique partnership with GitHub Education, bringing world-class colocation services to their famous Student Pack for the very first time.
  • Cisco hardware on-site – we drastically expanded our on-site hardware stocks in 2019, now holding over 250 different Cisco model lines at our London Central facility, ready for immediate deployment both on-site and off-site.
  • Team expansion – we undertook a complete reshaping of our out-of-hours team early this year, with five new engineers joining the extended workforce. We’ll also be welcoming new Technical and Sales Managers to the day team early next year.
  • Connectivity growth – we now provide a wide range of connectivity services on our ever-growing metro network to a number of notable international carriers, including PCCW, RETN and IDE Group.
  • The next stage – we’ve massively fleshed out plans for the next phase in our development cycle, as we look towards accelerated growth and expansion over the next three years – watch this space!

As you’d probably expect from looking at the above, we’ve also exceeded our performance targets for the year by considerable margin, which ensures the stable, reliable ongoing operation of your mission-critical data centre services.

This is an extremely important factor to bear in mind when deciding who best to work with on long-term projects of this nature. Providing this peace of mind to our clients is something we are hugely proud of.


Looking ahead

2020 is set to be a year of major change as we look to execute plans for the next stage of our growth strategy.

We’re hoping to publicly announce these plans early in Q1.

Alongside these sweeping expansion plans, we’re also looking forward to the excitement of business as usual here at Netwise; introducing a range of interesting new customers to our facility and network in 2020, a number of which have already been arranged for execution in Q1.

We’d like to wish all of our stakeholders a fantastic New Year, and a prosperous 2020. We look forward to sharing it with you.