Data centre provider Equinix has formally launched its fourth Sydney facility, SY4, although it already has more than 20 customers operating out of it according to Jeremy Deutsch, the company’s local managing director.
The data centre provider last year detailed its US$97 million investment in SY4. The facility has usable floor space of more than 12,500 square metres and an at-launch capacity of 1500 cabinets; at full build it will house 3000.
Globally, SY4 is Equinix’s 146th data centre. It forms a virtual campus with the company's other Sydney facilities — SY1, SY2 and SY3 — with the data centres connected by 2000+ fibre pairs in a redundant loop.
SY4 was launched by Deutsch, Equinix global CEO Stephen Smith and Johnathan O’Dea, NSW parliamentary secretary for trade and investment, major events and tourism, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony this morning.
“Once we enter a market, we like to maintain supply in that market,” Deutsch said. “Sydney 4 is a great example of that... We built this facility just in time when we ran out of capacity at our other facilities.
“We have seamless connectivity between them and we ensure that our customers can scale as they need to, and we do that ahead of their actual requirements to make sure it’s there ready for them when they need it.”
The Hawaiki submarine cable system, which will stretch to the west coast of the US via Hawaii, will terminate inside SY4, Deutsch said. The Trident cable also recently announced it will put a metro connectivity PoPs in Equnix’s SY1 and ME1.
“There is more undersea cable being laid in 2016 than has been laid in the entire last five years,” said Smith. “Why? Because all the biggest cloud providers in the world know that the traffic the cloud is enabling is going to surpass the current undersea cable capabilities.”
Vocus and TPG already have a presence in SY4, with other network operators to follow, Deutsch said.
Equinix announced earlier this month that it had completed its expansion of ME1, bumping the Port Melbourne data centre’s capacity to 1125 cabinets and giving it a total colocation area of around 3325 square metres.
