Data centre provider, Digital Realty Trust, has confirmed it will build data centres in Melbourne and Sydney, with completion expected by Q4 of 2012.
The 30,250 square metre site in Melbourne, located in the Paramount Industrial Park complex, was acquired for $4.1 million.
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The planned facility will be capable of supporting eight 1440 kW data centre performance optimised data centres (PODs).
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In addition, a $100 million, 9300 sq m facility in Erskine Park, Sydney was acquired in July and is scheduled for completion in Q3 of 2012.
The Erskine Park site is capable of supporting approximately 18,600 sq m of data centre development with over 11.5 megawatts of capacity.
Digital Realty Asia Pacific regional head, Kris Kumar, told Computerworld Australia that he did not think the data centre market in Australia was crowded at the high end of the market.
"We're targeting the system integrators, government and enterprise customers and we also have a different business model to some of the other [data centre] vendors, such as IBM,” Kumar said.
“Digital Realty supplies the facilities and the space rather than the services.”
He added that the company has been engaged in discussions with a number of "serious prospects" in Melbourne before completing the acquisition.
"I can't say who those customers are but we always do our homework before we enter a market,” Kumar said.
“There is a limited supply of data centre space in both Sydney and Melbourne available to meet customer demand for reliable, flexible and secure facilities.”
As the carbon tax will be law in July 2012, Kumar said both facilities will feature power and cooling architecture, designed for green energy needs.
Both data centres will use the vendor's PowerVU software, which offers centralised monitoring and management of data centre power consumption, energy efficiency and load analysis.
"We are trying to make the data centres as efficient as possible, so less carbon tax costs have to be paid for by our customers," Kumar said.
While the company has no plans at this stage to build a data centre in WA to take advantage of the booming mining sector, this may be reviewed in the future once the Sydney and Melbourne facilities were built and had customers in place.
Digital Realty Trust, together with Macquarie Capital, is one of only two vendors left in the NSW Government consolidation of data centres contract. The other company is Leighton Contractors.
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