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CAGE MATCH: Microsoft, Dell open co-located bit barns in Oz

Whole new species of XaaS spawning in the antipodes

Microsoft has let slip one of its least-well-guarded secrets: two new Azure bit barns will go live in Australia next week, as predicted by Vulture South.

The opening will coincide with TechEd Sydney, and was revealed in one of Redmond's “Cloud Day” announcements (spotted by Lifehacker AU). In that emission, Redmond promised “General availability of Azure in the Australia region next week”.

The exact disposition of the data centres isn't known: Microsoft Australia says they'll be co-located in third party data centres, one in Sydney and the other in Melbourne. The Reg understands Redmond has hired segregated cages in local data centres and that access to the Azure servers is sometimes not possible for the landlord's personnel, so tight is security.

Similar security arrangements are used by by Dell, which last week announced two new data centres in Australia. The newly-privatised company has taken space in Digital Realty bit barns located in Sydney and Melbourne, in addition to its existing facilities in Canberra and Brisbane. Dell will offer IaaS, SaaS and some lesser-known aaSes, namely Communications as a Service (CaaS), Disaster Recovery as a service (DRaaS), and managed Backup as a Service (BaaS) to local customers. Dell's also talking up a managed services model of sorts, in which its customers rent capacity from the company's bit barns rather than buying on-premises servers.

While Microsoft has today launched its own private cloud in a box, Azure Australia looks to be a more conventional public cloud play.

Both companies are keenest on Australian clients using the new bit barns, especially government users who might previously have worried about foreign powers seizing their disks. But there's an undercurrent of global expansion in the announcements too: a presence in Australia may introduce unwelcome latency, but does offer a politically-and-tectonically stable option for those assembling world-spanning cloud rigs. ®

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