Computerworld

Dell announces Aussie datacentre footprint, to move Cloud services to region

Moves into Polaris datacentre in Brisbane and another facility on the Eastern seaboard

IT giant, Dell, has unveiled its local datacentre play by announcing two “significant investments in the millions of dollars” to settle into two sites along the Australian eastern seaboard.

Dell Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) managing director, Joe Kremer, confirmed that the vendor is now occupying “significant space” in Polaris’ Brisbane datacentre, and another facility which he could not identify.

Kremer added that they are “state of the art, tier three, recently constructed, and highly scalable and secure environments.”

When questioned whether the initial datacentre footprint will put plans to build on hold, Kremer said, “I don’t know if it impacts that.

“I don’t know if being a landlord is quite important. We have 44 or 45 datacentres around the world, most of which we own, but we must work out which model suits the region.”

“In my opinion, in Australia there is a great excess of datacentre capacity and lots of people would be very anxious if somebody would take more space.”

“For me, it’s more of a financial decision; it has nothing to do with the offering. It doesn’t matter where all that IP is held. We might build in the future, but now, no.”

Dell A/NZ revealed that it has commenced offering ‘smart data hosting services’ from the datacentres, and has signed eight customers “to some reasonably chunky commitments.”

Cloud services

Following a visit by its corporate Cloud executive from the US, Dell A/NZ has also unveiled that it will be making a “secondary bunch of investments of further millions of dollars” to build out the full Dell Cloud service in Australia in an active-active basis between the two datacentre facilities.

The service is currently running in four countries, and the full catalogue will be available in the local market “later this year.”

Kremer said Dell has a “very significant number of customers eager to progress” with the Cloud service, and believes that the A/NZ business will be profitable in the first quarter.