HP plans $100m Sydney datacentre

Hardware giant Hewlett-Packard has confirmed plans to establish a massive new datacentre worth $100 million in Sydney's western suburbs.

"HP can confirm that it has submitted a planning approval with the New South Wales Government Department of Planning and Blacktown City Council for the construction of a new datacentre," the company told ZDNet Australia today in a statement.

HP added that the local government submission is currently making its way through the approval process, with public submissions now closed.

The company's massive datacentre project flies in the face of comments made yesterday by Microsoft's director of Developer and Platform Evangelism, Gianpaolo Carraro about the Australian datacentre environment. He feels that deploying large-scale datacentre facilities in-country is a tough ask.

"Climate, bandwidth and electricity are in short supply here ... the local market isn't big enough to sustain large datacentre projects. The only thing Australia has is lots of land," he said.

According to reports by The Australian, HP's new datacentre is slated for construction in a reclaimed quarry, owned by Austral Brick.

The announcement follows several other key ICT announcements in the datacentre area.

Digital Reality Trust, datacentre provider for social networking giant Facebook, heralded a $350 million venture down under last month, and Global Switch's $300 million "Sydney 2" facility was approved for construction in Ultimo less than a fortnight ago.

Even the Federal Government is considering getting a slice of the datacentre action, with the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) conducting a feasibility study into a federally owned and operated datacentre.

While HP confirmed that the new western suburbs datacentre was in the works, it declined to elaborate on the size or design of the facility.