Guy Danskine (Equinix)
Equinix has completed its $23 million expansion of its second Melbourne data centres, adding 500 new cabinets.
The global colocation provider’s M2 site in Port Melbourne now has 1,500 cabinets in total and colocation space of more than 4,070 square metres.
Once fully built, ME2 will include more than 8,190 square metres of colocation space and a total of 3,000 cabinets.
“The expansion of ME2 in Melbourne reflects our ongoing commitment and strategy to ensure our customers have access to a rich and diverse ecosystem of network and cloud connectivity services necessary to support their ongoing digital transformation needs,” said Guy Danskine, managing director of Equinix Australia.
“Melbourne is an important hub for digital innovation, attracting significant investments in its core infrastructure to support and enable its own ongoing transformation. Our expanded ME2 facility ensures we can provide secure, high-speed and low-latency digital infrastructure and services, driven by as-a-service consumption models and hybrid multi-cloud strategies.”
Melbourne's data centres now house the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and Googles’ cloud regions, with AWS expected to join later this year.
“Accessing public clouds locally provides a range of benefits, such as network efficiency and cost reduction, increased data security, and enhanced collaboration,” added Danskine.
“This ensures customers benefit from the advantages of deploying cloud-based services at the network’s edge, where digital leaders in sectors like financial services, education, healthcare, research and development, and government can rethink business processes and accelerate innovation.”
Earlier this year, Equinix added its virtual network function service, Network Edge, to its Melbourne data centre campus, making it the second location in Australia to offer the solution after Sydney.
The service allows businesses to deploy network function virtualisation from select vendors for digital supply chains, according to the data centre operator.
At the end of last year, Equinix announced plans to build two more data centres in Sydney after signing a $775 million (US$575 million) joint venture with PGIM Real Estate.
The partnership between the data centre builder and real estate investment firm will see the development of two xScale facilities, named SY9x and SY10x.
It also launched the first phase of PE3, its third International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre facility in Perth, on which it spent almost $72 million.
