CDC spend on datacentres to reach AU$400m by end of 2015
Canberra Datacentre (CDC) is on track by the end of this year to have invested between AU$350 million to AU$400 million over the last seven years in building collocation datacentres.
CDC currently operates three datacentres in Canberra across two campuses. The first campus is home to two 6 MW datacentres, while the second campus is home to the recently opened 18 MW datacentre. The datacentres have been designed to service customers who are predominately federal government agencies, and more recently managed services, cloud providers, and telcos.
Speaking at the Garter IT Infrastructure, Operations and Datacentre Summit, CDC CEO Greg Boorer said increasingly customers are realising the advantages of being part of a government certified datacentre ecosystem.
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"Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull talks about connected government and single sign-on, and that would be far easier if the backend infrastructure is collocated, which means it's more secure, the performance is better, and the opportunities to interconnect and share data across agencies is enhanced significantly," he said.
Boorer also announced that later this year, the company plans to open another datacentre to "marry up the capacity" between its campuses, so both campuses will have a capacity of 18 MW each to accommodate for the growth the company is expecting.
"We've brought in strategic investments to help us build ahead of the demand curve," he said.
Boorer said since CDC was first established in 2008, the way customers are acquired has changed over the years, and he believes that it is reflective of the way datacentres have evolved.
"We used to respond to tender, we'd win one agency, and we'd celebrate. Everyone did everything separately at the start. But since all agencies moved to shared facilities, they've realised it was a great opportunity," he said.
"While we're still signing agencies, agencies are moving into our datacentre to be closer to other agencies...because they're seeing more value in being inside the CDC ecosystem than outside."
A similar perspective was shared by Andrew Kirker, Schneider Electric general manager, who said the datacentre has moved from being known as a hardware protection environment to a data protection environment where it's flexible and faster to deploy.