Inside every data centre in Australia: meet Bevan Slattery's Cloudscene

NextDC and Megaport founder Bevan Slattery has launched a directory of the world's data centres, spanning more than 4,700 data centres across 110 countries.

Cloudscene is an online portal that provides visibility of internet and cloud service providers within specific data centres. It can be filtered by country, and the Australian search results list more than 200 data centres and over 500 service providers.

The company said that some of the service providers already actively using Cloudscene include Digital Realty, Telstra, VentraIP, EU Networks, Megaport, Vocus Communications, Epsilon, Superloop and NextDC.

Listings can be segmented by geography, covering 14 Australian markets – this includes Sydney with 56 data centres, Melbourne with 42, Brisbane and Perth with 31 each, as well as data centres in the other state capitals and other regional areas.

Cloudscene shows how many providers are hosted within a data centre, from Australia's largest, with Equinix's SY3 facility topping the list with 187 providers, to smaller regional centres, such as the three service providers operating out of Darwin's Secure Data Centre: AAPT, Over the Wire and GCOMM.

Slattery said he created the directory out of "frustration".

"It's been evident for some time that the traditionally long and difficult buying process for data centre and enterprise cloud services was not going to change. It was out of frustration that the concept of Cloudscene was born. Having invested significantly on these services myself, it became obvious that there was an information gap that needed to be filled" said Slattery.

He compared Cloudscene to aggregator websites. "Prospective tenants or home buyers haven't needed to visit individual websites of real estate agents to get listing information for over a decade. So, why is the tech industry stuck in the past when it comes to enterprise IT services?"

Cloudscene is already packed with detail, which should only get richer as time goes by. Jason Bingham, chief operating officer, said: "We have an extensive product roadmap in which Cloudscene will grow enormously. This is just the beginning."

Each data centre's listing boasts information such as power, security, building size, location and contact details. The data is "independent and verified", according to Cloudscene.

Cloudscene still lacks data: the profile pages for the likes of Datacom, AAPT and Vocus were empty of detailed information, while the website only offers sparse information about other facilities.

The portal is still packed with trivia for the data centre enthusiast. What is the power capacity of Global Switch Sydney West? That'd be 41MW. What about NextDC M1? That's 20MW across 17,500sqm of floor space.

Telstra apparently has a data centre in downtown Los Angeles, IBM operates eight data centres in Australia and the world's top-ranked facility, according to Cloudscene, is Equinix's SG1 site in Singapore.

The website lets users work backwards from fabric to find availability of services from the likes of Megaport and Pipe Networks. Users can also search by hyperscale cloud provider: for instance, Cloudscale claims that Microsoft has points of presence in Equinix SY2, NextDC S1 and B1 and Vocus Perth iX. Amazon has PoPs in Equinix SY1 and SY3 and GlobalSwitch Sydney West and Sydney East, according to the website.