Member Article

Aspire Planning to Invest £1m in Data Centre

Rapidly expanding managed services company Aspire Technology Solutions has officially unveiled plans for the construction of its own purpose-built data centre.

Working in partnership with Dixon Dawson Chartered Architects and Gateshead Borough Council, Aspire is planning to build a 3,500 sq ft data centre facility located on the same site as its existing headquarters at Heworth Hall.

Work on the £1m data centre is expected to start next year and be complete within 12 months. The facility will be categorised as Tier 3 which is one of the most stringent data centre ratings offering the highest levels of resilience, security and 99.982% availability.

Of the development, Chris Fraser, Technical Director for Aspire said: “When we first started renovation work on Heworth Hall back in 2010, we always had an idea that we would build our own data centre on the same site, thereby enabling us to support the ever evolving needs of the marketplace and provide high availability solutions, virtualisation, colocation, consolidation, remote management and remote monitoring.

“We already have presence in five data centres across the UK, all of which we will retain moving forward. It’s important to point out that the new facility is not about replacing existing space; it’s about further expanding our business and meeting demand.

“Our new data centre has been designed to be among the most energy efficient in Europe, using revolutionary evaporative cooling technologies rather than traditional refrigeration which results in greatly reduced electricity consumption for all IT equipment and servers. This in turn reduces operational costs which can then be passed on to our customers.”

Nigel Begg, Managing Director of Aspire, added: “We have invested heavily in our new headquarters and now have plans for the data centre which proves our commitment to the region and is evidence of our aggressive expansion plan. We have almost doubled the size of our workforce over the past 12 months and have plans to further increase the team later this year and into 2013.

“We have spent a number of years planning and preparing for significant growth as a business and we are now realising those plans. We have won some significant business in recent months which proves we are heading in the right direction and our data centre will be the next piece of the jigsaw.”

Headquartered in Gateshead and with sites in South Tyneside and Central London, Aspire is an award-winning managed services company specialising in hosted services, data centre solutions, communications and traditional IT outsourcing. Established in 2006, Aspire has grown steadily year on year to become a £3m business with a 32-strong workforce.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Isabelle Bambridge .