X
Innovation

Equinix expands Sydney campus with a fourth datacentre

Equinix has opened another international business exchange datacentre in Sydney, which is already being utilised by 20 customers and will eventually house the Hawaiki subsea cable.
Written by Aimee Chanthadavong, Contributor

Equinix has announced the opening of its latest Sydney-based international business exchange (IBX) datacentre.

The new datacentre, known as SY4, is a $97 million investment for the company and brings the total number of Equinix datacentres in Australia to five -- four in Sydney, known as SY1, SY2, and SY3, and one in Melbourne, referred to as ME1. The launch of SY4 takes the company's total global datacentre number up to 146 across 21 countries.

Made up of 12,500 square metres of total usable floor space, the SY4 at launch provides a total capacity of 1,500 cabinets, but is expected to provide a total capacity of 3,000 cabinets upon completion.

According to Equinix Australia managing director Jeremy Deutsch, the facility already has 20 customers plugged in utilising the facility, including managed hosting provider Servers Australia, cloud provider Zettagrid, and managed network service provider Connectivity IT.

In addition, Deutsch confirmed the 14,000-kilometere Hawaiki subsea cable connecting Australia and New Zealand to Hawaii and the west coast of the United States, which finally commenced construction in April and is due for completion by June 2018, will terminate inside the SY4.

He further added that the SY4 will be an additional point of presence (PoP) for network providers, including TPG and Vocus, as well as the recently announced Trident subsea cable that will connect the west coast of Australia with Singapore via Indonesia.

In fact, Equinix CEO Steve Smith said more undersea cables have been laid in 2016 than the last five years, pointing out Equinix is catching a large portion of that market.

"All of the biggest cloud providers in the world know the traffic the cloud is enabling is going to surpass the current undersea cable capability. The Facebook, the Apples, the Googles are funding these new cables. There are some 50 projects in the world today ... many of these new cables are landing into Equinix," he said.

Deutsch also assured the facility has been built to be highly resilient.

"We're utilising N+1 architecture when we build our facilities out. This basically means when we have three units to run full load for something we have an additional one. This enables us to obviously maintain services during faults of any particular unit and helps us to concurrently maintain the facility so we can keep the engine going the whole time without having any downtime for our customers," he said.

The guarantee from Deustch comes after Amazon Web Services, one of Equinix's largest cloud service provider customers, suffered a power outage in early June that disrupted the service of a number of major customers including Domino's Pizza, Foxtel Play, Foxtel Go, and Stan.

However, Smith assured the company was in no way involved with the AWS debacle.

"We run these facilities 24/7 for 365 days a year, and we have incidents every day, [but] that particular incident ... had nothing to do with Equinix ... that happened somewhere else," he said.

Updated 11.08am 23 August, 2016: Correction was made to the $97 million investment value to ensure it reflected US dollars and not AU dollars as initially reported.

Editorial standards