24 January 2018
Kao Data has announced the opening of Kao London One, the first of its four data centres to be built at its campus in Harlow.
Located in the London-Stansted-Cambridge technology corridor, the Kao Data Campus is 20 miles north of London Docklands and 30 minutes from Liverpool Street.
It is said to represent one of the largest developments in the UK. When fully completed, the £200 million campus will support an IT load of more than 35MW across 150,000 square feet of technical space.
The first data centre is now open with a fully operational technology suite providing 2.2MW customer-ready technical space within an 8.8MW powered shell.
Kao claims its campus offers the latest thinking in terms of design, energy-efficiency and sustainability, as well as flexible configuration to offer the some of the most advanced facilities available.
With concurrently maintainable site infrastructure, Kao London One is designed to provide 100 per cent uptime.
Together with climate control infrastructure utilising IEC (indirect evaporative cooling) units, the facility is said to provide “highly resilient” and “highly energy efficient” operations, with a PUE rating below 1.2.
Kao adds that the site is served by a dedicated and redundant 43,5MVA power supply, and that the design, construction and systems installation has helped it achieve “excellent” certification from BREEAM.
The company’s chief operating officer Paul Finch says the first phase of the Kao Data Campus has been brought to market according to schedule and on budget.
He says: “From the outset of the project we went back to basics, with an acute focus on reliability and availability. We have shown these attributes can be complementary to lower capital and operations expenditure, energy-efficiency and sustainability.”
Finch says that from a procurement perspective, Kao adopted a collaborative and shared risk approach to delivery.
“This has strongly positioned both us and our partners well for the future phases of the development. This is due in no small part to the experience of the management team and the decision to partner with an engineering-led main contractor, JCA Engineering, and key equipment suppliers.”