British telecom giant BT Group will spend $27 million over the next seven years on a new south London data center to strengthen its hosting and management services, the company said Thursday.

The 930-square-meter facility, which will have biometric security features, should be complete by September and has additional room for expansion, BT said.

The company wants to grow its data services business by 20% a year with an emphasis on enterprise, public sector and financial services customers. BT estimates the data services market is worth £5.2 billion in Europe.

BT is revamping many of its 70 data centers across the United Kingdom, said Rajiv Abeysinghe, BT's data center transformation manager, at a conference in London on Wednesday hosted by Intel. Customers are asking for the ability to architect and host applications within BT data centers, he said.

BT is also looking to maximize its return on investment in data centers, looking at ways to cope with power requirements with an eye toward renewable energy. The company said it reduced its carbon emissions by 60% between 1996 and 2006, and is working to up that figure to 80% by 2016.

BT is asking vendors to make products with wider limits on temperature, humidity and air quality, which could allow for more utility savings, Abeysinghe said.

The company is increasing the ratio of applications on each of its servers' CPUs while also looking at virtualization technology. BT would like to increase its CPU virtualization rate from around 7% to 10% to 80%.

"Virtualization can provide us with greater efficiency," Abeysinghe said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.