I t’s a beautiful day on the Slough Trading Estate. Unexpectedly warm sunshine beats down on a drab avenue of giant grey sheds. The perfect weather, then, to step inside a windowless room.
“We have two-factor identification here,” explained Mike Oxborrow, senior sales engineer at Equinix, swiping his ID card and entering his thumbprint on a panel. We are admitted into a black airlock space with heavy doors at either end. Once through the airlock — or “man trap”, as it is not so-politically correctly known — we enter the main data hall of LD6, full of long, spotless corridors lined with locked metal cages.
Within those cages are racks of black, plastic-smelling hardware, their fans whirring overtime and blowing gusts of hot air out the back. Beneath the floor, 80 giant chillers rumble away filtering and cooling the air..