London’s pricy data centres allow Frankfurt to overtake
There comes a price with being one of the largest data center markets in Europe – and funnily enough, that's price.
The January 2019 edition of the Euro-Data Center and the UK-Data Center Trends Trackers published by data centerpricing.com reveals that the UK average pricing remains more expensive than the other large markets of Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
The tracker provides analysis of the 15 key data center country markets in Europe with the total market size including space, power, new facility developments and average price changes.
Interestingly, Frankfurt has won the title of the fastest growing data center cluster and in doing so has overtaken the London - Inner M25 cluster to be the largest in Europe. Amsterdam and Slough have also experienced healthy growth.
Over the past six months, Germany has seen rapid growth in new data center space and facilities. New data centers – all located in Frankfurt – are being built by Equinix, Etix Everywhere, e-shelter, Interxion, Global Switch, and CyrusOne. Meanwhile, Noris Networks is expanding its Munich facility, and T-Systems is expanding its Biel facility.
Other additions of note include new data centers in Amsterdam from e-shelter, Equinix, Evoswitch, and Interxion, and new facilities in Madrid from Data4, e-shelter (planned), Equinix, and Interxion.
The UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands are the dominant figures in the data center country markets, with the four nations providing around 71 percent of the total data center space across the 15 largest Europe markets.
The highest average data center pricing in Europe is to be found in Switzerland, closely followed by the UK and Ireland, while the lowest average pricing is in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Italy.
In terms of the situation in the UK, average pricing varies considerably from region-to-region (as much as 40 percent), with around 12 major clusters including the London M25 area, Slough, Cardiff, Woking, Reading, Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle.
Obviously, the London and Slough areas come with the highest price tags in the UK, while Cardiff, Manchester, and Newcastle are the cheapest.
Growth in new data center space has noticeably slowed from recent years, however Virtus, CyrusOne, and Equinix (Slough) have all announced their intentions to introduce more data center space, while e-shelter has announced that it is to build a new data center campus in East London.
According to data centerpricing.com, another reason for the slowing of growth in the UK is that new data center build-outs in the London area are dependent on converting brown-field sites. Examples of this include Virtus converting former distribution warehouses into data centers, and e-shelter's plans to build a new campus data center on a former Aventis chemical plant.
While London - the Inner M25 area still has the largest concentration of data centers, Slough is nipping on its heels with the fastest growth rate of all the clusters in the UK.
