China Mobile has officially opened its first data centre in the UK, forming a key part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative to connect Asia and Europe. The data centre will directly connect to China Mobile’s existing data centres in Singapore and Hong Kong.
The new UK data centre represents China Mobile’s first data centre in Europe, and is seen as an important addition to the company’s global network. While the company does plan on also opening a site in Frankfurt in the future, the UK data centre will be responsible for serving as both an International Network Exchange hub and an Internet Data Centre (IDC), and will provide China Mobile’s cloud solutions to companies in the region.
Through the direct connection with China Mobile’s local ring in Europe and the Asia-to-Europe SMW5 cable system, the data centre is linked to the company’s Asia Pacific submarine cable systems, the SJC, APG and SJC2. This enables seamless connections within and between Europe, Middle East and Africa, Indian Ocean and Asia Pacific, giving business customers wide-ranging high-speed connectivity with the firm’s global network resources.
The UK data centre can also leverage the terrestrial cable system resources covering the belt and road region – notably, the Transit Europe-Asia 2 (TEA-2), Transit Europe-Asia 3 (TEA-3), Europe-Russia-Mongolia-China (ERMC), and Diverse Route for European and Asian Markets (DREAM) network. The overall network provides fast access to more than 300 cities in 31 provinces and regions throughout Mainland China.
As one of the Cloud Connect PoPs providing access to public cloud providers and cloud exchange platforms, the UK data centre also helps enterprises deploy multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud solutions and connect their networks across the globe.
“The opening of our new data centre in the UK is the sign of CMI’s commitment to promoting secure and reliable high-speed connections around the world, and we continue to see strong customer demand for connectivity, cloud and content delivery solutions between Asia Pacific and Europe, but also among with Middle East and Africa regions,” said Dr Li Feng, chairman & CEO of China Mobile International Ltd.
“In the big data era, data centres play a key role in facilitating information exchange. CMI provides professional one-stop-shop services, enabling enterprises worry-free opportunities to expand their business. Our UK Data Centre provides a powerful platform to meet the needs of the financial sector, internet businesses and other digitalising industries today and for the future.”
Located in Slough Trading Estate, the CMI UK Data Centre houses more than 1,600 racks. It has obtained the Uptime Institute Tier III TCDD data centre standards and offers 99.99% service and power availability.
In addition to the design incorporating three individual fibre cable lead-ins, the facility is served by a dual power supply from two different power substations. The power system is supported by 2N transformers and UPS, which is equipped with 10-minute backup battery under full-load. The data centre’s cooling system is supported by N+1 free-cooling chiller units and N+3 water-chilled CRACs are served for each data hall, where six-minute chilled water storage is reserved for continuous cooling backup. The facility has an N+1 diesel generator configuration with fuel storage for 24 hours under full-load.
