Equinix to open third datacentre in Perth

Equinix is opening its third datacentre in Perth to meet the growing demand for digital infrastructure and low-latency networking capabilities in Western Australia among global and local organisations.

Slated to open in the fourth quarter of 2021, the $54m facility – Equinix’s 18th datacentre in Australia – will also speed up the movement of data between Singapore and Australia by 50% on the back of expected growth in digital trade between the two countries.

The new facility will also provide companies that currently enter Australia via Sydney with a second path for redundancy as well as a faster route to Asia and the world.

The first phase of the Perth datacentre will offer an initial capacity of 650 cabinets and co-location space of over 1,830m². When fully ready, the facility will offer 1,650 cabinets and a colocation space of more than 10,600m².

Perth is a strategic part of Australia’s internet infrastructure due its proximity to Southeast Asia and direct connectivity via two subsea cable links, the Australia Singapore Cable and Indigo Cable, both of which terminate directly inside the Equinix Perth campus.

A third subsea cable is also being built to connect Australia to Oman via Perth to meet the growing demand from global cloud, network and over-the-top (OTT) service providers, as well as the government and mining sectors.

Through the new datacentre, enterprises can set up direct connectivity with public cloud providers including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, SAP Cloud and SoftLayer, as well as major network service providers including Telstra, Optus and Vocus.

A recent Equinix study found that traditional businesses are moving workloads to an edge-first architecture, and that Covid-19 is accelerating digital transformation in Asia-Pacific.

Also, industries such as banking and insurance, securities and trading, manufacturing and professional services will represent over 25% of global private connectivity bandwidth by 2023. 

This is led by the growing need to move workloads to the digital edge while scaling core IT infrastructure, reinforcing the importance of Perth as a gateway to international markets.

Equinix’s global footprint spans more than 220 datacentres in 63 metros. In Asia-Pacific, it has facilities in markets such as Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Singapore.

The Asia-Pacific region is poised to become the world’s biggest datacentre market by this year. According to JLL, a commercial real estate services company, APAC revenues for shared or co-location datacentres is expected to overtake that of the US, rising to 40% of global share by 2020.