We are proud to announce that the UK Home Secretary, The Rt Hon Theresa May MP, has officially opened a £multi-million extension to one of our data centres.

The Home Secretary was given a guided tour of the new facility in Maidenhead, Berkshire, by Angus MacSween, the CEO of our parent company iomart. It was the first time Mrs May had been inside a data centre.

The Rt Hon Theresa May said: “Data centres are an important part of the global economy, so I’m delighted to be opening this new facility for iomart. The technology on show is impressive and will allow businesses to be better connected than ever. It is interesting to see that the cloud has a physicality to it and isn’t just something up in the ether.”

The 1500 square metre extension took 12 months to complete. It features the first major deployment of Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA), which enables iomart’s network infrastructure and services to be dynamically and automatically provisioned alongside Cisco’s proprietary Bi-Directional (BiDi) Transmission technology, which allows 40 Gigabit Ethernet transmission over small form factor, duplex connectivity, which was previously only possible with more expensive MTP Fibre technology. The result is a greater level of scale-out without congestion points while providing optimised forwarding for all types of applications, and a network enabled for secure multi-tenancy at scale.

Angus MacSween, CEO of iomart, said: “We are delighted that The Home Secretary has officially opened our next generation data centre and seen first-hand the technology involved in creating the infrastructure needed to support the dynamic and ever-changing web hosting and data storage needs of SME and enterprise business.

“By investing in the latest Cisco technology, we are creating data centres that are not just software defined but customer defined. We are transforming our network to deliver the highest levels of agility, performance and flexibility.”