IBM shutters Melbourne data centre

IBM Cloud is set to close its MEL01 data centre in Melbourne at the end of November this year as part of a modernisation program.

The services giant said it was one of many facilities globally that have been determined as “older legacy” data centres that are “unsuitable for upgrading”.

The facility is scheduled to close on 30 November alongside two data centres in the US, and IBM has suggested three “modern” data centres in Sydney as migration options, specifically its SYD01, SYD04 and SYD05.

“IBM Cloud invests significantly in data centre infrastructure. These investments include rolling out newer data centres and multizone regions (MZRs) designed to deliver a more resilient architecture with higher levels of network throughput and redundancy,” an announcement from IBM read.

“Part of this modernisation strategy is to close older data centres that are unsuitable for upgrading. As this transition approaches, help is available to assist you in your migration to modern data centres.”

IBM said it notified customers of the closure in March 2020 by email.

Shah Hardik, the managing director of Sydney-based data centre provider Techflow, told CRN that his company had been contacted by former IBM Cloud customers previously housed in MEL01 in the past few months.

“Basically a lot of Melbourne-based [IBM Cloud] customers are pretty much given an ultimatum to move out, so we’ve got a couple of customers moving to us,” he said.

Updated 10:15am 13 November 2020: IBM has provided the following statement:

"To help our clients best serve their customers and optimise their businesses, IBM continuously evaluates, invests in and modernises its data centre infrastructure to ensure they can fully take advantage of the benefits of hybrid cloud. By shifting capacity to our newer and higher-capacity data centres, we are providing clients with higher value services and a more resilient architecture with increased network capacity and redundancy. IBM will continue to provide full support to our clients as they migrate to these new centres."