Interesting news story yesterday to see Hermes Real Estate Investment Management (a pension fund) and the relatively unknown GCE Data Centres have acquired a 3.2 acre site at 43 Western Road, Bracknell to develop a 60,000 sq ft data centre facility, in addition to offices.  Demolition of the existing site buildings will take place in 2011 with the first 2MVA of data centre available in the spring of 2012 followed by up to 8MVA by end of 2012.

The press release suggests this facility will be sold on leasehold or wholesale basis in modular units starting at 5000 sq ft each, so clearly this new operator will be aiming at the large scale corporate market and thus competing with Digital Realty Trust or Sentrum, both of whom operate data centre facilities nearby in Woking Surrey (Sentrum) or for Digital Realty in High Wycombe (Bucks), Redhill (Surrey) and soon also at Chessington (Surrey), to list a few of their UK sites.  Our belief is that this new site will be prepared to a standard shell and core specification with fit out of the halls to individual client specifications, once they have signed their lease;  at this stage we don’t see any commitment from the new operator to speculative build, ie without a signed lease, although this is a trend we are beginning to see in the wholesale market, for instance at Next Generation Data in Newport Wales or at Infinity’s Romford site.  We have been mentioning for some time that many wholesale data centre operators are now offering products that look a lot like large scale colocation deals (“wholo”) and speculative build is definitely part of this trend.

Retail colocation services might well be available at this site in due course through one of the tenants and these reseller opportunities often offer a great route for smaller colocation clients to take advantage of these high quality facilities on a per rack basis.  Indeed Colo-X has found some great value colocation deals  can occur from time to time through this model, such as the early 2011 promotion in Sentrum’s Woking when 5kW cabinets were available for £1000 per month, an astounding £200 per kW per month for a top notch Tier3 facility.