Equinix announced last week that its new International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre in Sydney will form the $160 million first phase of the South Sydney facility.
Named SY5, the facility is expected to open in Q3 2019 and will offer an initial capacity of 1,825 cabinets.The new IBX will be the largest to date for Equinix in Australia with 9,225 cabinets when fully built.
The density of carriers, cloud service providers (CSP) and subsea cables in South Sydney make it an important location for Equinix. A recent study by Frost & Sullivan also revealed that enterprises in Australia have high awareness of edge computing architecture.
As the Australian market continues to advance year-on-year with growth in cloud computing, big data, IoT applications and analytics software, and with 5G going live this year, Equinix says it will continue to expand its presence in the country by bringing local and global businesses ‘closer to the digital edge’ to support their digital transformation journeys.
The SY5 IBX will be located in Alexandria, about 2.5 miles from Sydney’s central business district, and will host a total colocation space of approximately 25,000 square meters when fully built. When the facility opens, Equinix will have a national footprint of 16 IBX data centres across Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Canberra, Adelaide and Brisbane, with eight in Sydney alone.
Equinix Sydney facilities enable companies to set up direct links to the continent’s two largest peering points along with direct access to: the trans-Pacific telecommunications cables network Southern Cross Cable Head; the PIPE Pacific Cable network that runs from Australia to Guam; the new submarine cable system Hawaiki that connects Australia with New Zealand; other Pacific Islands and the continental US; as well as the Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) between Australia and Singapore.
The new IBX will benefit from direct fibre cross connect capability between the SY1, SY2, SY3 and SY4 IBX data centres with the richest ecosystem of customers in Australia, including over 155 network service providers (NSP), 265 cloud and IT service providers, more than 75 financial services companies and over 55 content and digital media organizations.
SY5 will be located adjacent to SY4 with direct physical access between the buildings via a secure link bridge, creating a physical campus extension between the sites.
Equinix was named Frost & Sullivan’s 2018 Australia data centre services provider of the year for its ‘unmatched national footprint’ and robust interconnection services, creating values for its customers.
Over the past three years, the company has invested more than $800 million to build organically and expand its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. Equinix currently has 40 IBX data centres across 12 markets in Asia-Pacific. This January, the company announced building its fourth IBX data centre in Singapore and entering a new market in Seoul, South Korea.
Commenting on the company’s growth, Audrey William, senior fellow and head of research, Australia and New Zealand, ICT, Frost & Sullivan said: “The rise in the uptake of technologies such as analytics, IoT, cloud and 5G coming to fruition in Australia are built to leverage digital edge interconnections. Customer expectations will be high in terms of immediate availability of services, data and information with low latency. Edge computing architecture represents this next phase of IT transformation, and Equinix is at the forefront of this opportunity.”
