- New customer contract triggers second phase of the Harlow
campus build
- Harlow location provides a highly scalable, ultra-low
latency solution with local access for the EMBL-EBI engineering
team, saving significant OPEX
- High-quality RFP submission detailing Award-winning
CSR, renewable energy and low carbon aspects played a key factor in
the customers' decision making
- Kao Data continues commitment to delivering in 'best in
class' capabilities for customers in the Hyperscale and life
sciences communities
LONDON, Sept. 11, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kao Data, the home
of innovation and UK's leading entrant to the wholesale colocation
data centre market, has announced it has signed a new customer
contract with EMBL-EBI, a not-for-profit, international research
infrastructure and global leader in the storage, analysis and
dissemination of large biological datasets. This is a key
development in Kao Data's strategic goal to become the leading
provider of compute capability to the UK's Life Science community,
based along the London-Stansted-Cambridge
corridor.
The EMBL-EBI contract will initially utilise 1.5MW of capacity
across six Technology Cells within Kao Data London One's first
technology suite (TS01), offering the ability to scale quickly into
the new development in TS02 as future demands require.
EMBL-EBI provides some of the worlds most comprehensive open
access biological data, used by millions of researchers in academia
and industry globally. To-date, their data centres store over 270
Petabytes (277,000 Terabytes) of raw storage; an amount that
continues to grow daily, as new information from life science
research and genomic sequencing aids scientists in the quest to
understand our world and cure mankind's most life-threatening
diseases.
Although a research organisation with global reach, EMBL-EBI
requires local data centre resources and Kao Data's London One
facility is situated a short distance away along the M11. This
provides easy access for the research institute's data centre
engineers, ensuring continuity of in-house support, uptime for data
users and a significant saving in operating expenditure (OPEX).
Additionally, the location of the Harlow campus enabled decision
makers to visit the site and build relationships with the Kao Data
team, who demonstrated the facilities industry-leading design,
award-winning CSR aspects and OCP-Ready capabilities. Its ultra-low
PUE, reduced carbon footprint and commitment to 100 percent
renewable energy sources provide a highly energy efficient
environment with a low cost of operation, which played an equally
important factor in the selection process.
"The biological data we store and share through our data
resources are used by life science researchers all over the world
to power new discoveries," said Steven
Newhouse, Head of Technical Services, EMBL-EBI. "As such,
data centre space, physical security and infrastructure
availability were critical in our decision-making. Kao Data
provided a thorough, detailed and consultative approach, which
satisfied our technical and operational requirements. Its team also
demonstrated an in-depth understanding of the needs of the life
sciences. Their offer gave us the ability to quickly scale within a
single campus, which is another key benefit in this data-driven
environment."
Gerard Thibault, CTO,
Kao Data, stated, "EMBL-EBI is an
incredibly important customer and marks a significant achievement
in our strategic plans, demonstrating that Kao Data has a
technically advanced, highly sustainable and energy efficient
solution that provides key benefits to the life sciences community.
Our ability to exceed expectations and secure the contract against
incumbent suppliers further illustrates that Kao Data's technical
abilities, our resource and processes surpass legacy data centres
in the market."
About Kao Data
Situated in the London-Stansted-Cambridge technology corridor, the £200m+ Kao
Data Campus provides around 150,000 sq. ft technical space and 35MW
power for IT equipment. The completed site will comprise four 8.8MW
data centres, providing a customer product set from a Technology
Pod, Technology Cell, Technology Suite and complete Technology
Building, tailored to meet the demands of conventional ITE
infrastructure, through to specialist HPC and Edge at Scale
deployments.
Through technical leadership Kao Data continues to drive
innovation increasing reliability supporting 100% availability at
reduced total cost of operations. Dynamic load tracking at the
campus site ensures high energy-efficiency with ultras-low PUE
<1.2., even at 20% ITE utilisation. The company has made the
added commitment to 100% renewable energy to power its data
centres.
Served by a dedicated and redundant 43,5MVA power supply, the
quality of the design, construction and systems installation has
helped Kao Data achieve BREEAM excellent certification. The
technical capability, hyper-connectivity strategy and secure data
resilience of the Kao Data Campus makes it ideally placed to
support both cloud and hybrid-cloud solutions for a range of
enterprise businesses, including financial services, life sciences,
defence and the health sector.
For more details, please visit www.kaodata.com
About EMBL-EBI
EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is a global
leader in the storage, analysis and dissemination of large
biological datasets. We help scientists realise the potential of
'big data' by enhancing their ability to exploit complex
information to make discoveries that benefit humankind.
We are at the forefront of computational biology research, with
work spanning sequence analysis methods, multi-dimensional
statistical analysis and data-driven biological discovery, from
plant biology to mammalian development and disease.
We are part of EMBL and are located on the Wellcome Genome
Campus, near Cambridge, UK, one of
the world's largest concentrations of scientific and technical
expertise in genomics.
www.ebi.ac.uk
Press Contact
Spa Communications for Kao Data Campus
Simon Merrick
Tel.: +44-1892-511413
smerrick@spacomms.com