Global Switch, Akamai opening Sydney data centres

Australia’s data centre market just got even more competitive, with Global Switch commencing final-stage construction of its Sydney East facility, Akamai opening a new data centre in the city as part of its DDoS mitigation network and NEXTDC expanding the range of its offerings in Perth.

Global data centre operator Global Switch has commenced construction of the final two stages of its $300 million Sydney East data centre, located adjacent to the CBD.

The company said it has received a pre-commitment from a major cloud provider to make use of the new data centre. The facility is also being built to accommodate demand from a number of multinational companies.

Stage two of the construction is now underway and is expected to be completed in the second quarter of next year, at which time the facility will launch to pre-commitment customers.

Remaining space in the new facility will be progressively introduced. On completion the Sydney East data centre, combined with the already operational adjacent Sydney West facility, will span 73,000 square metres.

Stage 1 of the Sydney East data centre received a LEED Gold energy rating, and the expansion will follow the same design principles.

“With construction having commenced on the final stages of the Sydney East data centre, we look forward to providing further opportunities to new and existing customers to benefit from a network dense environment providing resilience and economies of scale,” Global Switch CEO John Corcoran said.

“The Global Switch Sydney campus serves as a core node not just for Sydney and Australia but, in terms of connectivity and services, a key hub for the Asia–Pacific region as a whole.”

Content delivery network service provider Akamai has opened its own new data centre in Sydney designed to mitigate against the risk of increasingly sophisticated DDoS attacks.

The new facility is designed to act as a ‘scrubbing centre’, analysing incoming traffic, identifying threats and removing malicious activities while ensuring minimal downtime for network end users.

When a DDoS attack against an Akamai client website is detected, incoming site traffic is rerouted to one or more of these scrubbing centres, and cleaned traffic is routed back to the client’s network.

Akamai Regional Manager Adam Riley said adding an Australian node to the company’s global DDoS mitigation network will allow local customers to benefit from more effective services.

“The new scrubbing centre will offer Akamai more advanced forensics on attack activity in Australia, which will enable continuous refinements to the protection of our local clients. In addition, customers will benefit from improved network performance and reduced latency,” he said.

Finally, local data centre as a service provider NEXTDC has announced a new arrangement with Nextgen Networks to give customers of its P1 data centre in Perth access to on-demand private connectivity to major public clouds.

NextGen Networks has connected its fibre network to the AXONVX virtual exchange within the Perth data centre. This connectivity will allow NEXTDC to offer customers with private connections access to AWS, IBM SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure and other major public cloud services.

NEXTDC will be able to provide connection speeds of up to 10 Gbps over Nextgen Networks’ extensive fibre network.

“Organisations across Western Australia ... can now access easily provisioned, direct connections to the world’s leading cloud platforms, from a range of data centres, and build their hybrid cloud strategies,” NEXTDC CEO Craig Scroggie commented.

“Nextgen Networks’ commitment to supporting the delivery of our AXONVX virtual exchange demonstrates the power of neutral connectivity-as-a-service and how it can rapidly deliver new value to existing infrastructure investments.”

Image courtesy of Christopher Bowns under CC