ENGINEERING students at UTC Heathrow, based in Northwood, had the rare opportunity to tour an operational CyrusOne data centre.

They saw the racks of servers used to store computer data (email, website, online transactions for some of the biggest companies in the world.

Shortly before school broke for the holidays, seven students visited CyrusOne’s LON1 site based in Slough.

The purpose of the tour was to support the learning the students have been doing on the data services industry as part of their Engineering BTEC course.

One of the students, Lucas, said: “This has helped me to decide I would love to start a career in the data centre industry.”

UTC Heathrow is a high-tech school for students aged 14-18, specialising in engineering and IT. University Technical Colleges (UTCs) are government-funded.