HSBC has confirmed plans to build a new Sydney-based data centre facility but the project's cost will be "significantly less" than speculated figure.
A spokesperson for HSBC told Computerworld Australia the new data centre would be the international bank's main Australian facility for communications, with direct links to regional data centres in Hong Kong, where the bank hosts its core systems. According to the spokesperson, the data centre has been designed to support HSBC's long-term plans in Australia as it aims to expand its presence and customer base in locally.
“The primary Hong Kong facility is one of the largest data centres in the Asia Pacific region, and provides global services to HSBC customers," the spokesperson said.
However, they said the $20-30 million figure first reported in <i>The Australian</i> this week was not realistic, with actual project costs likely to be significantly less.
The bank is not the only company to invest in data centres with HP recently announcing a new data centre as part of its $US1 billion transformation program to retire legacy assets and build new, modernised facilities. The facility, to be located in Western Sydney, will aim to capture more of the growing spend on Cloud computing services, application modernisation and data centre transformation.
Fujitsu also jumped on Cloud bandwagon recently, announcing public and private Cloud offerings will be based in the vendor's tier 3 data centres in Australia and will be expanded this year to include a software as a service (SaaS) suite including messaging, customer relationship management (CRM) and unified technologies. The services would be built off continued investments in local data centres located in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.
Follow Chloe Herrick on Twitter: @chloe_CW
Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU