Most automated warehouses are designed around speed. Rugby 4 was designed around stillness. Iron Mountain stores, retrieves and delivers records for its customers, and at its Rugby 4 unit each pallet location holds a single SKU that can stay in place for years. It's what's known as dead storage, and that slow flow is what makes this project different from most automation work.
The building is a 250,570 sq ft, 18-metre-high unit in the Midlands area the logistics industry calls the Golden Triangle. For operations manager David Wright, the brief came down to dense cube. When stock hardly moves, the question stops being how fast you can pick and becomes how many cartons you can fit under one roof.
74,000 pallet locations on eight levels
Movu's answer was an atlas pallet shuttle system. It stacks eight levels of storage to 18 metres, with 74,000 pallet locations and 21 shuttles moving pallets in and out automatically. Between them they hold around 4.4 million cartons on site.
Some of the density comes from the pallets themselves. Iron Mountain uses custom pallets sized to carry as many cartons as possible, so every one of those 74,000 positions holds more paper than a standard load would.
Throughput is modest. The system averages around 30 pallets in and out an hour and handles up to 50 at peak, which suits a site where records stay put for years. For the people working there, the bigger change is that nobody climbs to an upper level or walks the aisles to fetch a pallet. The system brings it to them.
The warehouse control software comes from PureLoX, which Movu partnered with before its own Movu OPS platform existed. The system has been running well, and Iron Mountain's team now looks after it largely themselves, with Movu supporting as the site grows.
Looking back on 18 months of work, the view from Iron Mountain's side was clear:
"It's a unique system, never done before, and it certainly wouldn't have been achievable without the support and partnership with Movu."
Invited in for a day
On 8 July 2026, Rugby 4 hosted the launch of Movu On Tour. Beth Marshall, Movu's Commercial Director for the UK, guided customers and prospects through the live, working system, so they could see it running for real instead of watching another presentation. Movu has around 200 sites in the market, the first of them live since 2017 and 2018, and On Tour is how it opens that experience up to people weighing automation.
What visitors mentioned first was the quiet. One said it barely felt like the site was running, because everything happens in the background. Another hadn't expected it to be as dense as it is.
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