As one of the sponsors of Manchester Digital's Emerging Tech Conference 2024, nLighten have shared their insights on how they see emerging tech as a strategic priority for 2025 and beyond.
Supporting business growth, efficiency and innovation across the region
Global data centre infrastructure is largely being driven by hyperscale public cloud provider organisations such as Microsoft, AWS and Google and other tech giants such as Meta (Facebook) who require huge amounts of data centre space, power and cooling to operate their server farms.
At the same time SME and large enterprise businesses are realising the cost, productivity, innovation and security benefits of so-called ‘colocation’ data centres. This entails moving their IT workloads off their own premises – ether in part or entirely - into colocation facilities which are purpose-designed to support and host their core IT, latest AI-based applications, and hybrid cloud solutions.
However, data centre quality varies hugely in terms of power availability, resilience, connectivity, security and environmental credentials. It is vital to evaluate these criteria carefully.
Equally data centre location is key. In the UK, where outside of Greater London there are around 40 densely populated urban areas, strategically located regional data centres are especially important. Being closer to where the action is removes the inherent distance-related network traffic bottlenecks and untenable response times experienced with overly centralised data centre/cloud computing models - where everything is hosted and stored on servers in larger data centres hundreds of miles away. Even in a relatively small country the size of the UK, distance-related latency means thinking regionally, moving data closer to users to minimise latency.
The need for speed
With this development, a new category of regional ‘edge’ colocation data centre is rapidly emerging for supporting the new era of edge computing. Highly connected, including links to local internet exchanges, they are located close to major conurbations in proximity to highly populated areas. Not only do they greatly reduce network latency, bandwidth congestion and data transit costs by being physically closer to users and customers, the financial burden of operating inhouse facilities is removed.
Business benefits
Latency: Low latency is the number one driver. Low latency means enterprises can gain increased agility, greater productivity, improved customer service, and reduce costs.
Enterprise users and modern software demand increasingly fast response times, driven by enterprise cloud and software-as-a-service utilities as well as e-commerce. This requires low latency connections which is also seen as essential in delivering future 5G, IoT and AI-enabled technologies and applications: from smart cities and automated factories to remote surgery driverless vehicles.
Flexibility: Colocation at a local data centre compared to an on-premises approach enables businesses to avoid major capital expenditure (Capex) when funding their immediate and future IT requirements. With data centre colocation the costs are met through operating expenditure (Opex), as you effectively rent space for housing your IT equipment along with the critical infrastructure to run it such as power, cooling, network connectivity. Furthermore, you can scale up or down depending on your computing and cloud needs, rather than being stuck with an in-house data centre or computer room which is either too small or too big and will regularly need technology refreshes.
Security: Modern local data centres like ours are purpose built for ensuring high physical security and resilience to mitigate risk of unplanned IT downtime, for example, due to power outages, flooding, fire, theft. With data being processed and stored closer to home rather than travelling long distances, data security is also enhanced.
nLighten’s North West edge footprint
nLighten already have 10 regional edge colocation sites across the UK including serving underserved areas which would otherwise continue to be disadvantaged. Our goal is to have 15 - 20 UK data centres within 15 miles of 95% of the UK population, adding to the growing number of sites we have in mainland Europe.
The North West is a key UK region and we will continue to evaluate potential requirements for additional sites here Currently, our two North West data centres - Chester Gates serving Greater Manchester and Liverpool serving Merseyside - are direct points of presence (PoPs) on major networks for making them easily accessible to enterprise businesses along with Content Distribution Networks, Cloud and Mobile operator providers.
For example, we are collaborating with Zayo whose high capacity network connects to nLighten in Chester Gates, offering low latency circuits and increased resilience for customers requiring multiple connections to cloud services. For example, it connects data centre hubs in the USA, Dublin and the North West of England. Our partnership with Virgin Media O2 Business is a further example of adding maximum connectivity choice to customers in the area. Additionally, we are partnering ITS to provide regional data centre capacity on their new dark fibre ring in the Liverpool City Region.
This is in line with our strategy of enabling nLighten’s data centres to function as secure interconnected regional communications hubs for the benefit of our customers, offering the widest availability of diverse high-speed, low-latency fibre connections to carriers, ISPs and cloud providers.
Find out more about how nLighten’s edge data centres can support your business growth and latest tech investments: www.nLighten.eu
