A tour round Equinix's new LD5 datacentre

Such resilience is vital for the types of service the datacentre will be hosting, McCabe explained.

"We have major carriers running their network through here, multiple cloud-computing services hosting their data here as well as many corporate and financial institutions' data too," he said.

"Cloud computing in particular is an area that is growing rapidly, and many firms now use our centres to host their data. Salesforce.com has a presence in several of our datacentres worldwide. This gives them geographical resilience and helps reduce latency.

"These days even a split second of latency can have an impact, particularly for financial firms, so the speed and resilience of our datacentres is central to the customer's requirements."

The unabated growth of data being sent across the world means that Equinix has had to look to acquisitions to match the demand for datacentre space. The firm is on the verge of completing the purchase of US firm Switch and Data, which will add around 34 data centres in 22 markets in the US and Canada.

Back to Slough, though, and we end the tour on top of LD5 looking at the air-conditioning units that chill the water that is sent back into the system to cool the air that is pumped around.

But almost before the paint has dried, it seems, the firm is already considering its next move.

"By 2013 we'll have completed the deployment of all the phases in LD5, and then it'll probably be time to start work on LD6," said McCabe.

Click here to see a series of photos from the tour.