Equinix expands data centre footprint with the opening of Melbourne's ME2
Equinix has opened the doors to its fourth data centre in Melbourne following a $77.5 million investment in the facility.
ME2 is situated in Melbourne's Fishermans Bend region adjacent to ME1 and initially includes more than 29,300 square feet of colocation space. Once fully built out, the facility will span more than 88,000 square feet.
The opening of the new data centre comes almost a year after Equinix initially announced it would build the ME2 data centre, with the company saying "various factors" had affected the construction progress. Equinix had initially slated for the build to be completed by the third quarter of last year.
Recently appointed Equinix managing director Guy Danskine said the growing demand for capacity was the key motivation for the company to expand its data centre footprint.
"As we've seen the Melbourne economy grow and the Australian data centre industry as a whole continues to grow, we've been very successful in filling ME1 out with about 220 customers in Victoria, and 80 of those are cloud and IT companies … and just that demand necessitated us to invest in ME2," he told ZDNet.
The opening of ME2 follows the company's launch of SY5 in November and the completed expansion of its second Perth facility, PE2. There are now 17 Equinix data centres in Australia across Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Canberra, Adelaide, and Brisbane.
Looking into what else is planned for this year, Danskine said Equinix also has its eyes set on more expansion plans in Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore, as well as finalising its acquisition of bare metal cloud provider Packet this quarter.
"When the acquisition closes, Equinix will add important new capabilities to accelerate the development and delivery of additional on-demand bare metal services that meet the market's full range of use cases," he said.
"For example, customers can maximise application performance by deploying adjacently to global internet exchanges or at the centre of hybrid multiclouds within Equinix."
When the acquisition is finalised, Packet will continue to operate with the same team and platform, and will see its offering be available to Equinix customers, but not available in Equinix's data centres.
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