Currency broker seals £300m datacentre expansion deal

Currency broker Leverate is embarking on a major datacentre upgrade that will see the transition of its servers to two new service providers, in a deal worth £311m ($500m).

The move is intended to minimise latency for Leverate's customers and ensure continuous uptime. Customer data will be simultaneously stored across the two sites, reducing the risks of data loss and problematic transactions, said Doron Somech, Leverate's chief technology officer.

“By establishing our own private servers within these two new datacentres, we are providing our clients with virtually zero downtime, reduced latency, increased execution speed and the fastest feed available,” he said.

The announcement was made against a backdrop of growing uncertainty over the availability of space in Tier 1 datacentres across Europe.

The most recent market data from construction consultancy CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) showed that in the second quarter of 2011, the availability of space in Tier 1 datacentres in Europe – which it measures as the unoccupied proportion of total datacentre space built – dropped to its lowest levels in a decade.

In London, the bellwether of the European datacentre market, CBRE noted that the total volume of datacentre space had plateaued, while the space available had shrunk.

“London has now clearly reached a point at which new supply is required to satisfy present and future demand,” said Andrew Jay, a director at CBRE.

Traditionally, a lack of space has pushed up prices for managed services and colocation. But there are signs that price rises may be avoided.

The uncertainty in the global economy is likely to reduce demand for datacentre space and curtail providers expansion plans, noted Jay.

Meanwhile, analyst firm Gartner recently predicted that spending on hardware in the datacentre looked set to rise – but as analyst Jon Hardcastle pointed out, it does not follow that firms need more space, thanks to improvements in server design and technologies such as virtualisation.