Pacnet opens Sydney data centre

Pacnet has opened a new data centre in the Sydney CBD, to be fully operational in March.

The centre replaces space formerly operated in Bond Street. The facility will be used both for customer projects and to provide a live backup of Pacnet’s Singapore network operations centre.

The data centre is not huge by the standards of greenfields constructions – except for the remnants of the original air cooling systems that once ventilated Commonwealth Bank mainframes.

The company has taken three floors in the Liverpool Street building, with an option for a fourth. The location has heavy load capability on all floors, having been constructed for 1970s mainframes, and can house as many as 200 rackspaces with 6kVA per cabinet.

It’s part of an aggressive international push into the data centre market in the Asian region. Pacnet CEO Bill Barney told media today that the regional data centre market, worth $US2bn today, is under-served. It’s only five per cent of the size of the American data centre market, he pointed out, but in a region that serves a much larger base of internet users.

Australian data centres are reportedly operating at close to capacity, and the country’s relatively limited international connectivity makes it attractive to mirror and distribute content onshore (for example, in the growing content distribution network sector). This, Barney believes, makes it attractive to build data centres in Australia.

It’s also an attractive customer proposition for Pacnet. Barney noted that the average data centre customer “buys six to seven dollars’ worth of network capacity for each dollar they spend in the data centre”. ®