The latest datacentre news on the Tier 4 front comes by way of cloud and co-location specialist Pulsant. The company just announced the completion of a major expansion project as its Tier 4 data centre in Milton Keynes. The expanded centre, which is approximately 45 miles north of London, now boasts 37,000 ft.² in a facility that is highly secure and PCI compliant. Pulsant currently operates eight data centres throughout the UK ranging from Tier 2 to Tier 4 and servicing some 3,000 customers. In addition to the Milton Keynes facility the company is also expanding facilities in South London, Reading, and Scotland. The focus is on providing secure, resilient, and state-of-the-art Tier 4 facilities outside of London. According to Pulsant CEO Mark Howling, the Milton Keynes facility is the company's new flagship data centre. In addition to collocation, hosting, managed services and entry-level cloud computing, the centre will also provide a home for the company's new Enterprise Cloud Platform. The new platform emphasises the speed, efficiency, and performance Pulsant's clients demand. It's especially important for those in the financial sector; they can afford to be behind the game on any given day. “For those whose data is absolutely crucial for sales, CRM or business operations, our enhanced Tier 4 facilities offer unmatched resilience, performance and support to keep their websites, databases and networks live at all times,” noted Howling. “That’s why over 100 customers already trust our Milton Keynes site.” When the expansion of all four data centres is complete the company will have added some 2,000 state-of-the-art racks in the company's most strategic locations. Those four centres will be operating to ISO27001 standards with up to 15 kW of power. They will provide the backbone of Pulsant's high-speed network in the UK. Expanding the Cloud Pulsant's expansion is not only good for the company and its customers; it's also good for cloud computing in the UK across-the-board. Adoption of the cloud is slower in Europe than it is in North America primarily for two reasons: concerns about security and potential downtime caused by power outages. The whole idea of the Tier 4 facility is to deal with those things more effectively. By definition a Tier 4 data centre employs fault tolerant infrastructure and advanced power management to ensure uptime of at least 99.99%. That kind of uptime is critical to cloud computing given the way cloud architecture is designed. Businesses that migrate to the cloud can ill afford to have even one data centre go down because it disrupts the entire environment. Pulsant's expansion efforts should improve their market share and bring considerably more clients on board. Look for them to make some strides in the financial sector as well as other industries with mission-critical data and managed services requiring the security and resilience of Tier 4. It will be interesting to see what they do with the remainder of their four data centres in the future.