11 September, 2019, London, United Kingdom - 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.”
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.
For more details, please visit www.ebi.ac.uk.
Spa Communications for Kao Data Campus
Simon Merrick
Tel: +44 1892 511413
smerrick@spacomms.com
