Internode flags $1.4m datacentre upgrade
National broadband provider Internode has announced a $1.4 million investment in its Adelaide datacentre, and has promised energy efficiency upgrades for the facility.
It opened its Adelaide datacentre in 2007, building on two previous ones, and will now expand the size by 144 square metres.
Internode will install high-density hosting racks that it says will increase customer capacity by 45 per cent. Before the announced expansion, Internode provided low-density hosting at the rate of 2 kilowatts per rack. Now, with an extra 18 racks, the company will be able to offer "high density" services with up to 10kW rack allocations.
Using 100 per cent GreenPower, the new datacentre area is planned to deliver a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.5, much more efficient than many datacentres, which have a PUE ratio of 2.0 or higher.
Internode CEO Patrick Tapper said he was confident the expansion and the improved services would bring more customers. "We already have a substantial sales pipeline of demand for datacentre space," he said
"Organisations include a number of current clients looking to consolidate multiple racks into a single high-density rack. We also have some interstate clients looking for a remote backup site to enhance their disaster recovery systems and new clients seeking co-location services. With that volume of demand, we anticipate no problem in filling our expanded datacentre," he said.
However, Internode will face competition, in a market that is about to explode with new datacentre space.
Japanese IT services giant Fujitsu, for example, opened what it billed as the nation's most advanced datacentre in Perth several weeks ago, and HP has recently confirmed plans to invest millions of dollars in a major new facility in Sydney's Eastern Creek. Global Switch has also confirmed a significant new facility in Sydney, where it already hosts a massive datacentre.
NextDC, a new company founded by Pipe Networks co-founder multimillionaire Bevan Slattery, also listed on the ASX this week, with big plans to cause a splash in the market.