I have been in a lot of technical facilities over the years and they always fascinate me, particularly the scale involved in the really big ones.

When I was at GEC Telecoms in Coventry, we had a visit to GEC Turbines in nearby Rugby. This huge facility had lathes the size of houses in order to make massive turbines and generators. BT was GEC’s main customer (apart from an export market mostly to Nigeria) so I got to visit quite a few BT sites as well.

Now the telecommunications approach to apparatus rooms was based on solid floors, wide open racks a cabling grid above and travelling ladders to access the higher equipment. Meanwhile, the computer industry needed to go for a clean room approach with raised floors (to accommodate cooling and plumbing), shiny equipment cabinets and anti-static treatment.

Gradually the IT and Telecoms approaches have combined into what we now call Data Centres, vast temples to the manipulation of the byte.

I have been into several Data Centres over the years, varying from small purpose built rooms to vast computer halls the size of sports centres. Some of them have a layered approach to resilience, others are just thrown together ad-hoc. Standards have gradually emerged for robustness of the facilities, from tier 1 (basic, no resilience) to tier 4 (Highly resilient, mission critical). I have visited places that claim to be tier three but aren’t any more because they have expanded so much and their N+1 or N+N resilience no longer meets the design brief (where N is the requirement and the +1 bit is spare capacity for fault tolerance.)

(If you wonder what level our Data Centre is, I tell people it is a tier three…quarters!)

The really big constraint on a Data Centre is available power. Servers gobble up a lot of electricity and it can be hard to persuade the Electric Companies to provide it unless your site is on a former smelting works, for example.

All of that power generates a lot of heat which has to be removed. As there is rarely a nearby swimming pool, it is classed as low grade heat and isn’t much use other than for heating warehouses, or more commonly simply expelling into the atmosphere. (Notice the cooling towers to the right of the two large buildings at Google’s massive Dalles Data Centre here).

Now UK big business is getting worried about power and several big Companies have moved their facilities out of the City of London as the infrastructure is at capacity. Where do you move it to though? It takes a lot of time and money to get a Data Centre up and running so there is mileage in getting it hosted in another facility.

Sound the fanfare, because Wales has the answer. Buried amongst the presentations linked to yesterday is one from Next generation Data called “thinking outside the circle“, the circle presumably being the M25. NGD Europe 1 is described as the UK’s largest and best-equipped secure data centre. It has up to 180 MVA of power available, enough to power a City (and about 5% of Drax’s output). It has room for 17,000 equipment racks in eighteen separate data halls, each one totally autonomous. It has connections to three separate telecoms carriers, has state of the art environmental systems and is very secure indeed. It also has a Bistro, a Gym and Bunks for the Engineers. They also boast in their brochure (pdf) of “Conference Suits…”

Watch the flash video, which takes you on a computer generated walk-through of the building. It is very funky and It reminds me of the Starship heart of Gold, although the doors don’t talk to you and are there are no robots sulking in the corner! The long trek through the security doors also brought the opening credits of  Get Smart! to mind.

There is a small catch though- it isn’t actually ready yet. It will be open for business later in the year but I was surprised that I only heard about it recently, when something like that would normally take years of planning. However, NGD have taken on a former white elephant, a massive factory built in Newport, Gwent for the LG Electronics Group at vast expense, propped up by the public purse and never actually opened (You can see the whole sorry story in the sidebar of this story on the BBC) . the site has stood empty for ten years and is a suitable shell for its new use, with the power & cooling souped up for its new role as a monster data centre.

It is an impressive specification and it is likely to appeal to Corporates if the price is right. It is not subject to flooding, away from flight paths and at low risk from chemical hazard. Of course, it is vulnerable to being hit by a meteorite but is far enough from Cardiff to avoid the collateral damage from enemies of Doctor Who!