Global Switch, the leading owner and operator of wholesale carrier neutral data centre space in Europe and Asia Pacific, has commenced construction of the first stage of its second Australian data centre.
The new 24,000 square metre (260,000 square feet) data centre, called Sydney East will have a power capacity of 32 MW and is to be built on Global Switch's campus next to its existing Sydney West data centre which is adjacent to the Sydney Central Business District. Sydney West is already the largest of its kind in Australia at 32 MW over 42,000 square metre (450,000 square feet). Early stage earth works having been completed, construction will begin immediately and the first Stage which constitutes about one third of the total project will be completed by the first quarter of 2014.
Sydney East is the next investment in Global Switch's £1 billion plus expansion plan, which commenced with an extension of its Singapore data centre in 2010 and the building of a second data centre on its Paris campus in 2012. In Australia, Global Switch is responding to on-going growth in data centre demand, particularly from financial institutions, governments, telecommunications carriers and managed services providers.
John Corcoran, Global Switch's Executive Chairman, said: "With the construction of the Sydney East data centre, our Sydney campus expands upon its already impressive, highly resilient environment delivering further benefits to new and existing customers that result from the scale economies of our facilities."
"Australia is an extremely attractive investment destination given the growth in domestic demand for data centre capacity and also the geo-political benefits it offers to multinational companies. With the Asia-Pacific region at the centre of global growth, Australia is in a unique position as a safe and reliable location from which to service that market."
Damon Reid, Managing Director of Global Switch Sydney said "The increasing trend for corporations to outsource their IT activities as their data centre needs expand and the huge growth in cloud computing are driving significant growth in data centre services. Sydney East will provide our customers with a network dense, low latency data centre solution to meet their growing needs and it reinforces Sydney's position as a strategic telecommunications hub of global importance."
Sydney East will incorporate world-class data centre design and leading environmental innovations and is targeting a LEED Gold Rating. It will offer a range of flexible and secure solutions to our customers. On completion of Sydney East, the entire Sydney campus will offer 64 MW of onsite power generation.
A number of large multi-national companies, including a leading software and services corporation, a global systems integrator, a multinational information technology corporation and a managed services provider who are existing customers of Global Switch have made pre commitment agreements to become anchor tenants for Sydney East.
"We are delighted to have successfully secured high calibre anchor tenants for over 50% of Stage 1 of Sydney East and expect to secure the remaining capacity for this Stage before it becomes operational in early 2014" said Mr Corcoran.
Global Switch operates 290,000 square metres (3,100,000 square feet) of data centres across seven locations in Europe and Asia Pacific. It opened its first Australian data centre, Sydney West, in 2002.
Global Switch is a Reuben Brothers company.
