Building data centres is expensive. Equinix has announced plans to construct its fifth Australian data centre, and the price tag is a cool $97 million. No wonder we’re all heading to the cloud.
The SY4 centre will be built in Alexandria in Sydney’s inner suburbs, close to Equinix’s existing Sydney facilities, which will be connected via a dedicated fibre loop for easy data transfer. (Equinix also has one data centre in Melbourne.)
The initial build will include 1500 cabinets in a 12,500 square metre centre, but that will eventually double in size. The first phase is due for completion by mid-2016.
Looking at that figure, it’s no surprise that we’re favouring hybrid cloud or pure cloud models. Outside of Australia’s banks, hardly any local company could justify that scale of investment for purely internal services.
Comments
8 responses to “Building A 3000-Cabinet Data Centre Will Cost You At Least $97 Million”
I don’t understand what’s meant by this: where else are cloud services hosted, if not for data centres like this one?
People heading to the cloud is surely the exact reason data centres like this are being built?
could have been a comment comparing the cost of building your own server infrastructure vs using a commercially available cloud product?
I thought the same thing. The magical cloud data’s gotta be stored somewhere too…
If you’re building a $97 million dollar data centre, surely the cost of outsourcing to a cloud service provider would be substantially more. Cloud service providers need to make money on top of what it costs to run the physical servers. Sure there are circumstances where cloud hosting is cheaper or has other benefits (such as convenience or redundancy). Though there are also circumstances, where even for small scale stuff, it is cheaper to go with a dedicated server or host it yourself.
lol what? Pretty sure your average RAID NAS won’t break the bank. Not everyone needs a massive data centre, and those large organisations that do have reasons for not wanting to use the cloud (like security and *cough* cost)
And for some organisations, having their own data centre makes perfect sense.
I can’t imagine Google, Amazon or Microsoft storing their data “in the cloud”.
(I despise that term. It is utterly meaningless).
It’s mainly where commercial IT is leading, really. With the availability of products like vCloudAir and Softlayer & the price tag that accompanies them, it’s becoming preferable to run company infrastructure from the cloud rather than having to maintain your own server room.
But the point still remains that *someone* has to have the server rooms, data centers, etc