brightsolid, leading Scottish cloud hosting and data centre provider, has today announced the opening of its second Tier III data centre.
The state-of-the art facility, built on the Aberdeen Journal’s Lang Stracht site in Aberdeen, has been designed to the highest technical specification and will provide unrivalled digital infrastructure to Europe’s Energy Capital.
Completed in just nine months, brightsolid’s latest data centre represents a £5million investment into Aberdeen’s digital economy, and as the only Scottish partner of the Microsoft Cloud OS Network, provides the first Microsoft Azure-enabled cloud platform in Scotland. Located at the centre of Aberdeen’s energy triangle, the facility delivers best practice in business continuity, flexibility and choice.
“I’m delighted to have reached this pivotal moment in our three year strategy after such an exciting two years,” said Richard Higgs, CEO of brightsolid. “We decided to build our next Tier III data centre in Aberdeen for a number of reasons. Our primary facility in Dundee was reaching capacity due to the positive market response to our clouds, and expansion was always in our business strategy. After a detailed review of the market we realised that Aberdeen had an absolute need for a world class data centre and cloud partner that could help deliver on cost saving efficiency objectives.”
“Our critical mission is technical innovation with personal service and key to delivering on this is our ongoing collaboration with customers, particularly in Aberdeen at this time of disruption, to craft and develop solutions together that really meets customers’ requirements. Another part of this is our Microsoft Azure enabled cloud, the first in Scotland. This is exciting as we hope it will be the first of many ground-breaking announcements to come from brightsolid to help Aberdeen stay digitally connected.”
At full capacity, the 2,200 square meter facility will hold the equivalent computer power of over 100,000 MacBooks and will have the ability to store the same amount of data that Facebook currently holds on a global scale. The carrier neutral facility will connect Aberdeen nationally and internationally through high-speed, low latency links – including a 100Gb link from Aberdeen to London. Helping position Aberdeen as a global tech and comms hub, the data centre will be connected nationally through brightsolid’s own UK-wide network and internationally through their range of partners to all major energy cities.
Mike West, Managing Director at Keysource said: “We are delighted to have been able to work with brightsolid on delivering this word class data centre facility in Aberdeen. We share brightsolid’s vision for embracing the latest technology solutions including high density IT infrastructure and have been able to underpin this with highly resilient efficient infrastructure. As with any project of this scale, we had to overcome a number of engineering challenges but through working together closely, brightsolid now has one of the most efficient data centres in the country. We look forward to supporting brightsolid as it moves into operation and in helping it successfully grow the site as it continues to deploy its customers’ solutions.”
“The support we’ve received from our partners has been outstanding,” continued Higgs. “Our connectivity partners have absolutely understood the need for increased bandwidth and connectivity across the city as well as internationally to all major energy hubs. Our infrastructure partners have listened to our flexible, hybrid approach to cloud and provided us with the right infrastructures to serve the needs of our customers not just today, but through the next decade, whilst helping us to grow our business. I’d like to thank everyone involved in our project for their ongoing support and encouragement.”
Tier III certified by the Uptime Institute, brightsolid Aberdeen reaches operational excellence in business continuity and security. Managed round the clock by an in-house team of expert engineers, brightsolid delivers a 99.99 percent uptime as standard, and is certified compliant in ISO 27001:2013 security and ISO 22301:2012 in business continuity.
brightsolid Aberdeen is also one of the greenest data centres in the UK. Thanks to the use of the latest cooling technology, ecofris, the facility it will operate a Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) of 1.25, 80 percent more efficient than the UK data centre average. This means that the facility is both kind environmentally and commercially, being significantly cheaper to cool than a standard facility as well as less power hungry.
Technical specifications of the data centre
- Design PUE of 1.25
- 1MW IT load
- Able to support up to 25kW per rack with no hotspots
- 2N Critical Power Solution with N+1 back-up power
- Ecofris™ free cooling utilising a Flooded Airflow approach with N+1 back up
- 24x7 onsite security and monitoring
- Uptime Institute Tier III classification