Last year Quocirca wrote about the Temples of IT that drive 21st Century technology. The article was inspired by a visit to Equinixs LD4 data centre facility in Slough (west of London in the UK). Equinix is a global co-location provider, which builds huge data centres and then rents space in them so that businesses and providers of IT services can house their equipment in enterprise class facilities that they could not afford to own and build themselves. LD4 refers to its 4th London data centre which is now full, so on April 21st, 2010, Equinix unveiled LD5.

With 27,800 square meters of gross space (as opposed to the smaller measure of white tile space on which kit can actually be placed) it is Equinix's 2nd largest data centre in Europe. Being purpose built, the facility is state of the art, as opposed to those data centres that are retrofitted into buildings originally intended for other purposes, such as warehousing.

This mean a range of environment measures have been built in, ranging from a "swimming pool" (or bund) in which the oil tanks to power its back up data supply are placed (to contain potential leaks), through energy efficient lighting to "evaporative humidifiers" that use 5% of the power of traditional equipment.

The data centres backup power supply is "distributed redundant", which is expressed as 2(N+1). That means for every critical set of components there is at least one addition component in reserve (the N+1 bit) and that redundancy is doubled up throughout the facility. So, where a backup power system with a single UPS (uninterrupted power supply) unit would be sufficient in most circumstances, each system has two units and there are two separate systems.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about LD5 is its location. LD1, LD2 and LD3 are distributed around London itself, but LD5 is just a few blocks along from its older sister LD4 on the Slough trading estate (fictional home of the BBC comedy "The Office") which is a lot cheaper than central London. Equinix calls this a "campus" arrangement, which as has further advantages.

The two data centres provide a level of redundancy for each other, whilst customers can consider them as a single logical facility as they are linked by two thousand strands of fibre. These actually comprised of two sets of one thousand strands taking different routes, each capable of being run, monitored, managed and tested separately, while still having the bandwidth for the data centres to transfer data between each other as if they were using their internal networks.

Finding skilled labour can be a challenge, but Equinix has done so. LD5 involved taking on 25 new employees alongside a similar number working at LD4. Equinix is also sponsoring apprenticeships. However, there is an inflow of skilled labour to the area because Slough is rapidly becoming a Mecca for data centres.

Nearby are two other large data centres owned by other service providers; Rackspace and Savvis. Rackspace's 8,300 square meters of gross space requires more staff per square meter as it is providing a full hosted IT infrastructure rather than just data centre space; it created 65 new jobs when it opened in 2008. Savvis provides both managed hosting and co-location services in its slightly smaller data centre and will have created around 30–50 jobs when it opened in 2008, although it does not publish staffing figures. There are other data centres on the estate too, operated by major financial institutions.

All this data centre activity also creates contract jobs for security, cleaning, facilities maintenance and so on. And beyond the data centres, other businesses receive a boost from sandwich shops to gyms. The data centres also create a huge demand for communication services and power; the latter could be Slough's Achilles heel if it was not addressed.

Communications providers can quite easily lay more fibre and provide access to the data centres; Equinix's LD4/5 campus has a total of 35 communication providers with a point-of-presence. But the power supply network presented a bigger challenge for Equinix.

The UK's National Grid draws much of the power required for the Slough Trading Estate from the nearby Slough Combined Heat and Power Station. However, such is the scale of LD5 that Equinix had to make a significant investment in upgrading its connection to the nearest grid super-node at Iver to the west of Slough. This was essential in case the local power station itself was to fail and all power had to be drawn from further afield. As the number of data centres in Slough continues to grow, their owners need to work with power suppliers and the National Grid to ensure this does not become a problem for all in the area.

John Betjeman once encouraged Britains enemies to drop its bombs on Slough (Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!), bemoaning its sprawling industrial landscape. Lets hope this never happens. Equinix and others may be building some of the worlds most resilient and secure state-of-the-art data centres in Slough but even they might not survive aerial bombardment.