Equinix to open Melbourne IBX data centre

Equinix plans to continue its global expansion with a new data centre being established in Melbourne.

The company will make an initial investment of approximately AU$117 million to build the new International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre.

The first phase, to be named ME2, is set to open in Q3 2019 with an initial capacity of 1000 cabinets.

In addition to providing geographic redundancy solutions for customers currently residing in Equinix facilities across Australia, the ME2 IBX will offer space to new customers wanting to benefit from the network effect of its rich interconnection ecosystem.

It will be located in Port Melbourne, around six kilometres from Melbourne’s central business district. The IBX will host a co-location space of more than 2730 square metres at completion of Phase 1 and more than 8190 square metres when fully built.

“The past few years have been an exciting time of growth for Equinix globally as we aim to provide the best possible support for our customers navigating digital transformation. Australia is a key market in the Asia–Pacific region for Equinix, and we have been investing heavily to capitalise on the opportunities in the market as a result of digital transformation and increasing adoption of cloud services,” said Samuel Lee, President, Equinix Asia-Pacific.

As part of Platform Equinix, ME2 will offer a wide range of interconnection options, including Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric, which enables businesses to set up on-demand and secure connections to more than 1400 participants across all regions around the world. ECX Fabric provides cloud on-ramp to more than 265 cloud service providers (CSP) in Australia, including Alibaba, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, SAP Cloud, Oracle, SoftLayer and other local providers.

“We started in Melbourne only four years ago with our green fields build of ME1. Fast forward to today, we now have four sites with two distinct campus locations in Melbourne. These sites house a combined ecosystem that provides the perfect building blocks to enable digital transformation. The Melbourne metro continues to provide some of the most advanced hybrid multi-cloud implementations. Together with the upcoming ME2, we are creating a place where enterprises can interconnect and leverage our services,” said Jeremy Deutsch, Managing Director, Equinix Australia.

Equinix IBX data centres in Melbourne make up two campuses, giving customers network-rich redundancy options for implementation of a resilient infrastructure in the metro. ME2 will be located adjacent to ME1 with direct physical access between the buildings via a secure link bridge. The proximity of ME2 with ME1 allows for seamless expansion of services for existing Equinix ME1 ecosystem members.

The ME2 IBX will also benefit from Equinix Metro Connect connectivity to the ME4 IBX in Derrimut, providing customers with the ability to support geographical diversity and redundancy as needed to support full business continuity within the state.

Image caption: Rendered image of the new facility.

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