Equinix Expands for Local Data Centre Demand
Equinix Expands for Local Data Centre Demand
June 8, 2007: Equinix, has announced the completion of the Sydney Internet Business Exchange with a $5 million upgrade to its Mascot data centre to make way for increased customer power and cooling requirements.
The data centre and Internet exchange services provider says thye facility is now available for new customer deployments, with a multitude of carriers available at the centre to offer network services.
Doug Oates, managing director for Equinix Australia, told IDM the $5 million expansion was prompted by market demand, especially for outsourced operations. “We’ve seen the market has been growing significantly, with the uptake of web-based applications and corporate outsourcing,” he said. “A lot of corporations are accepting the model of not having to own and operate their data centres.”
Another market driver prompting the expansion has been the increased uptake of blade servers. “As organisers are refreshing their hardware they’re deploying more blade servers, therefore needing more power and cooling requirements,” says Oates. “Data centres built 10 or 20 years ago can’t cope with these new requirements.”
For Equinix, it’s also a matter or being one of the few network neutral data centres on offer. “In Sydney there hasn’t really been any new neutral data centres since the year 2000,” says Oates.
So how exactly do you plan for a facility of this scale and size and how do you factor in security and disaster planning requirements? The facility is located in Mascot, approximately 8km from Sydney’s CBD, close to the airport and related transport, but not under a flight-path.
“We purposely choose the facility based on a number of criteria,” says Oates. “One was that we didn’t want to be CBD, we wanted to be outside of the CBD because customers often have the requirement that their two sites be a distance from each other.
“The second criteria was around the Telco connectivity option. Because we’ve close to the Southern Cross Cable station, we have a lot of Telcos running fibre past the building, possibly making it one of the most connected facilities in Sydney.”
One of the first customers to move into the expanded centre is Melbourne IT, a Web and application hosting company. Melbourne IT says it will use the expanded Sydney base to supplement its existing data centre facilities and launch its On-Demand Managed Service portfolio, designed to help business deploy enterprise grade infrastructure in real-time.