Zen invests £4m in new data centre

Richard Tang in the current data centre

Zen Internet has announced it is investing £4m in a new purpose built data centre at its Rochdale headquarters.

“As the cloud computing trend continues to gather momentum and businesses are increasingly reliant on IT systems to function, it has never been more important to ensure that a company’s mission critical applications are hosted in a dedicated, energy efficient data centre. This provides a secure, temperature controlled environment, which has access to reliable, resilient power and connectivity,” said Andrew Saunders, Head of Product Management and Marketing.

“Zen’s headquarters will provide the ideal location for the new data centre and is in response to increased demand for capacity in the North West. The data centre also meets the increasing demand for hosting services from Zen’s existing customers,” added Mr Saunders.

Once complete the 1,350 sq metre Tier 2 facility will be monitored around the clock by automated management systems, an onsite central monitoring team, CCTV and onsite security guards. The new data centre will be fitted out with state of the art power and environmental management infrastructure providing 2MVA capacity.

N+1 standby power generation and uninterruptible power will be supplied by Diesel Rotary Uninterruptible Power Supplies (DRUPS) ensuring Zen’s Hosting customers will get 100% uptime from their hosted services. Even the most demanding connectivity and bandwidth requirements will be easily accommodated as the new data centre is directly connected to Zen’s fully diverse core network.

Zen has been providing hosting services to its customers for the last 16 years and is already an experienced data centre operator having opened its first facility in 2001. The new data centre further enhances Zen’s growing hosting portfolio and Phase 1 of the build, which is due to open in Spring 2012, will house a range of Managed Hosting, Managed Cloud Hosting and Co-location services.

“Our mission is to provide the best ISP service in the UK. Translating our mission into action requires us to continually improve every aspect of what we do. This latest investment represents a significant improvement to our business, making a world class data centre available to our customers, and backing it up with an industry-leading level of support and service,” said Richard Tang.

“This is a very exciting time for Zen. Technology and the Internet are developing as fast as ever, and it’s fantastic to be part of it,” added Mr Tang.

The contract for the design and build of the new data centre has been awarded to the UK’s leading communications infrastructure specialist, Sudlows.

Andy Hirst, Global Projects Director at Sudlows commented: “The design of the new data centre will provide Zen with the ideal platform to offer its customers secure and fully resilient hosting services and ensure it maintains its status as the best ISP in the UK.”