Digital Realty expands Singapore footprint

Digital Realty has opened its third and largest datacentre in Singapore as it ramps up efforts to carve out a bigger slice of the growing market for datacentre services in Asia-Pacific (APAC).

The new 50MW facility, SIN12, will enable local and multinational companies to deploy critical infrastructure and scale their businesses to tap opportunities in the region’s growing digital economies.

Speaking at the opening of SIN12, Mark Smith, APAC managing director at Digital Realty, said the new datacentre is adjacent to its current facility, SIN11, in the east of Singapore. The two datacentres are connected by high-count fibre routes and linked to the company’s first Singapore datacentre, SIN10, in Jurong, in the western part of the city-state.

“This offers our customers an opportunity to really look at Singapore as one whole connected campus, taking advantage of the three datacentres that we have across the country, as well as the phenomenal connectivity via 24 subsea cables connecting into Singapore, creating a very rich ecosystem of digital services available in Singapore and around the region,” said Smith.

Along with the launch of SIN12, Digital Realty is introducing its PlatformDigital colocation offering that will help enterprises standardise infrastructure deployments and instantiate multicloud connectivity, among other uses. Singapore is the second location in APAC where PlatformDigital is available, said Smith.

He added that while Digital Realty sees the growth and the demand for digital services and the need for enterprises to aggressively digitise their businesses, there is also a need to build datacentres in a sustainable way to minimise the impact on the environment.

“SIN12 is our most efficient datacentre that we have in APAC, despite the fact that we are in a tropical environment in Singapore which is nearly on the equator,” said Smith, adding that the datacentre was granted Green Mark Platinum certification by Singapore’s Building and Construction Authority.

With a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.25, SIN12 incorporates efficient cooling systems and controls to minimise evaporation losses and improve water-use efficiency. It will be equipped with turbine generators rather than diesel engines and a combination of uninterruptible power supply and lithium-ion batteries will facilitate sustainable management.

A building management system will monitor thousands of data points to ensure the datacentre is running efficiently and providing optimal energy performance for customers.

Singapore is ranked fifth in the top 10 datacentre markets globally, according to Cushman & Wakefield. These findings coincide with Digital Realty’s Data gravity index, a recently published study that measured, quantified and determined the implications of the explosion of enterprise data.

Data gravity is expected to more than double annually from 2020 to 2024, with APAC expected to generate the fastest growth across all regions. Singapore is expected to be the second fastest-growing market across the 53 global metros analysed, driven by growth in the intensity of data in the banking, financial services and high-tech manufacturing industries.

In APAC, Digital Realty operates a network of datacentres in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Melbourne and Sydney.