How to choose the right Australian data centre

What does a service provider say? Rackspace

Well-known hosting provider Rackspace uses both Digital Realty and Equinix facilities in Sydney to provide its Australian services. Angus Dorney, Rackspace ANZ general manager, says that the Digital Realty facility is used as the company's primary site, while the Equinix site is used for disaster recovery.

“We feel as though there are benefits to maintaining multiple relationships,” Dorney says. “A big factor is diversity and redundancy in our vendor and partner networks.” Rackspace, being a global company, has global relationships with both Digital Realty and Equinix.

“The standards Rackspace demands from any of our data centre providers are consistent no matter who the data centre provider is,” says Dorney. “We have great relationships with both.”

Dorney highlights an interesting constraint when it comes to the geographical location of co-location services. Many enterprise customers use infrastructure and software with particular requirements for replication – think low-latency for virtual machine replication and synchronous storage array replication – which place limits on how far away a data centre can be from a customer’s primary site.

There are pure physical limits to what technology can achieve, so be aware of what customers are using if you plan to offer services to them. Remote replication can be too far away.

What does a service provider say? VMtech

VMtech has chosen Equinix as its preferred supplier for co-location facilities, and uses both the Sydney and Melbourne facilities to provide services to customers. The fast-growing IT solution provider landed at No.16 in the 2015 CRN Fast50 with 87 percent growth to hit $20 million revenue in 2015. The company also took home the coveted Editor's Award.

VMtech’s private cloud hosting business has been growing strongly, so strongly that it may create a capacity issue for the company as the Equinix SY3 facility nears its capacity limits. Equinix has already begun building another facility, SY4, but VMtech is aware of the possibility that the company may need to explore other options.

“Obviously our business and supporting our customers comes first,” says VMtech’s technical director, Richard Clark, “However, wherever possible, we want to maintain Equinix as our preferred supplier.” Clark cites the network connectivity of Equinix, particularly its connectivity into public clouds, as very important to VMtech’s business.

“We’ve heavily invested in our infrastructure within Equinix facilities,” says Clark, “and standing up additional data centres would mean that we’d need to extend our networks and base infrastructure into additional facilities.” He also notes that most workloads can be served from Melbourne, and locating in Sydney is frequently a case of customer preference to keep their infrastructure nearby, rather than any technical requirement. For all the talk of moving to cloud, it seems people still like to keep tabs on their servers.

Others

We’ve just scratched the surface of the offerings available in the Australian marketplace. Other providers to consider include:

• Fujitsu
• HP Enterprise
• Canberra Data Centres
• Macquarie Telecom
• Metronode