Equinix, Inc. has announced it plans to invest approximately US$60M to build a new data center in Melbourne. Equinix's new Melbourne data center — called ME1 — will address strong demand from customers for premium data center services in Melbourne, as data consumption and cloud services experience continued growth in the Australian and global IT markets.
"We continue to see a surge in demand for data center and interconnection services in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region and the addition of ME1 will aid enterprises looking to gain proximity to customers and partners and to improve application performance for employees and end-users in Australia," said Tony Simonsen, managing director, Equinix Australia.
Located in Port Melbourne, ME1 will provide a capacity of 1,500 cabinets, with the first phase of 375 cabinets scheduled for completion in Q4 2014. Equinix will construct a specially built 105,000-sq-ft building shell to house the new ME1 data center and allow for future development.
ME1 will be built to meet the LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System™, a framework developed by the U.S. Green Building Council for identifying and implementing practical and measurable green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions. The plan currently includes evaporative coolers to support low power usage effectiveness (PUE).
Melbourne is a hub for software companies with Victoria accounting for almost a quarter of Australia's economic activity. The ME1 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center will enable existing Equinix customers to expand into the second largest market in Australia providing opportunities for business connectivity in APAC and across Equinix's global footprint[1].
The expansion of Equinix's footprint in Australia is the latest in a series of expansions across Asia-Pacific markets, enabling Equinix to assist multi-national customers looking to expand into local and regional markets. ME1 will be the company's fourth data center to be built in Australia and allows businesses to connect to leading companies inside its dynamic business ecosystems to accelerate their digital supply chain, particularly within the networks, financial services, cloud, and digital content markets.
The Australian IT market is continuing to experience significant growth. Cisco's Visual Networking Index predicts that by 2017 there will be 23 million Internet users in Australia – up from 18 million in 2012. In Australia, IP traffic will reach 30 gigabytes per capita in 2017, up from 14 gigabytes per capita in 2012, making it equivalent to 2 billion DVDs per year, 189 million DVDs per month or 258,430 DVDs per hour[2].
[1] http://www.invest.vic.gov.au/competitive-dynamic-business-environment
[2] http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/sp/vni/vni_forecast_highlights/index.html
