Equinix slurps IO's London bit barn

Equinix has revealed that it quietly acquired a data centre operated by US outfit IO.

IO's Slough data centre has been renamed “LD10”, making it a sibling to Equinix's LD 4, 5 and 6 which also reside in fabulous Slough, home of the fictional Office made famous by Ricky Gervais.

LD 10 has “350 cabinets of sold capacity and a total colocation space of approximately 3,340 cabs”, so has lots of lovely room into which Equinix can grow.

The company says LD10 will enjoy the same fast connections to the world it provides from its other London bit barns, with data requiring just 30 milliseconds to reach New York and a mere four to fly to Frankfurt. (And might Equinix's decision to quote those numbers perhaps suggests it has few worries about post-Brexit traffic from London's financial services industry?)

Equinix's EMEA president Eric Schwartz's canned quotes say the company made the purchase because “London remains a global economic engine, with leading enterprises and cloud service providers making it a primary hub for IT infrastructure.” More capacity in London is therefore a good thing.

IO still has bit barns in the United States and Singapore. LD10 joins a pair of Equinix bit barns near Wembley, another in the City of London and another still near Canary Wharf. Mancunians have a further four locations to consider.

Nobody's being gauche enough to discuss money and news of the acquisition only emerged on Monday, after the two companies signed a deal on January 7th, 2017 and finalised the transaction last Friday, February 3rd.®