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Digital Realty: 90% of Aussie enterprises still use on-site datacentres, server rooms

There is plenty of opportunity for datacentre outsourcing in Australia, according to the datacentre operator's senior vice-president and regional head for Asia Pacific Kris Kumar.
Written by Spandas Lui, Contributor

Australia is a ripe fruit ready for datacentre operators to pick, as 90 percent of enterprises are still operating out of their own datacentres or server rooms, according to Digital Realty senior vice-president and regional head for Asia-Pacific Kris Kumar.

"All of those need to come out," he told ZDNet. "As technology becomes more complex, it gets incredibly difficult to run [datacentres and server rooms] within an office environment — that's happening now."

This is a gold mine for third-party datacentre providers like Digital Realty, according to Kumar.

Vast amounts of datacentre equipment are being stored in buildings, which were never built, to handle the storage of this type of gear, he said.

"It's also an absolute waste of commercial real estate space," he said.

The datacentre operator has been advancing into the Australian market for the last 18 months and already has hundreds of datacentres dotted around the world. The high number of enterprises running their own on-site datacentres isn't just isolated to Australia, as Kumar said that Digital Realty is seeing the same opportunity in the US.

As well as wasting precious office real estate, which is expensive in Australia, companies also have to concern themselves with the energy inefficiencies of running an on-premise datacentre or server room, according to Kumar.

He acknowledged that datacentres chew up a lot of power, but said that specially-built modern facilities are actually quite energy efficient.

"Nobody really talks about how much energy these datacentres are actually saving," Kumar said. "If you were to run the same processes in traditional office building computer rooms, they can be three times more inefficient.

"The datacentre industry is actually saving a lot of energy globally."

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