Equinix to invest $42m to expand Sydney datacentre
Equinix SY4 datacentre in Alexandria, Sydney.
Equinix has announced plans to invest $42 million to expand its SY4 International Business Exchange (IBX) datacentre to meet demand for additional capacity and interconnection services.
The NASDAQ-listed datacentre company said it will add 1,500 cabinets to the SY4 datacentre -- opened in Alexandria in August last year -- bringing the total capacity to 3,000 cabinets, with a total usable floor space of more than 12,500 square metres.
Jeremy Deutsch, managing director at Equinix Australia, said Australia is fast becoming "an interconnection hotspot", as supported by a recent survey the datacentre company conducted with 1,000 global IT decision makers.
"This drive towards greater interconnection makes a significant bottom-line impact on businesses and markets, as 40 percent of interconnected Australian companies have realised more than $10 million in revenue opportunities and cost savings," Equinix said in an announcement.
The survey additionally found that Australia is the largest Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market in the Asia-Pacific region, thanks to key cloud players such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Equinix said its Sydney campus, which comprises SY1, SY2, SY3, and SY4, can set up direct links to the continent's two largest internet peering points, in addition to key submarine cable systems, including the Southern Cross Cable Head, the PIPE Pacific Cable, and the impending Hawaiki cable which will terminate in SY4.
SY4 currently supports more than 100 local and multinational companies, and its expansion is set to be completed by the end of 2017.
Phase two of the SY4 expansion is the latest in a series of datacentre expansions across the Asia Pacific region. Earlier this week, Equinix announced it would be investing $41.8 million for the eighth phase expansion of its SG2 IBX datacentre in Singapore, adding 1,400 cabinets and 4,428 square metres of colocation space, which brings the total operational capacity of the datacentre to 6,300 cabinets.
In June, Equinix announced it would be offering Alibaba Cloud via its Cloud Exchange in a move that will give the Chinese IaaS player more access to enterprises in new markets.
Equinix's Cloud Exchange offers private access to a range of cloud providers such as from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle.
Equinix also announced the availability of its datacentre monitoring software, which allows businesses to monitor power, mechanical, and environmental conditions in real-time, for customers in its IBX datacentres in Australia. The software is available in SY4 and will be available in SY3 and Melbourne's ME1 datacentres by the end of the year.
In May, Equinix closed the $3.6 billion purchase of 29 datacentres from Verizon, which enabled the company to acquire 600 net new customers and about 3 million square feet of datacentre space.
The deal included an agreement for Verizon to resell Equinix's colocation and interconnection services bundled with its own managed security, network, and communications services. The companies are looking to assist customers with managing hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
Equinix CFO Keith Taylor said previously that the Verizon deal will add $480 million to $500 million in revenue in the first 12 months and will cost about $40 million for the company to integrate the assets.