NextDC launches new AWS Direct Connect in Sydney

Australian data centre operator NextDC has launched its second AWS Direct Connect in Sydney from its S2 data centre.

These private connections help to reduce networking costs, ensure smooth and reliable data transfers at scale, and provide a more consistent network experience than connections over the public internet, NextDC said in a statement.

The facility, located in Macquarie Park is the fourth of the company’s data centres to be established as a hosting location for AWS Direct Connect. The other facilities C1 in Canberra, M1 in Melbourne and P1 in Perth.

The data centre operator is providing 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps connections within the S2 data centre.

NextDC head of channel Steve Martin told CRN that the company's partners were increasingly leveraging premium public cloud services to support the resilience, innovation and growth objectives of their customers.

"Hybrid IT is now the de facto standard for enterprise IT architecture. Helping all organisations to get their unique Hybrid strategies represents a significant opportunity for the channel.

"NextDC and AWS continue to partner strategically to ensure that all our mutual customers and partners within our ecosystem are delivered the assurance of completely resilient and secured cloud infrastructures.

"Currently today, NEXTDC is the only data centre provider with AWS Direct Connect capability to every Australian AWS onramp. This advantage enables NEXTDC and our partners to ensure customers have the ability to accelerate data migration and access business applications across multiple locations, leveraging performance, security and scale”

Customers with dedicated connections can connect through the IEEE 802.1AE MAC Security Standard (MACsec) encryption to provide additional layer 2 security between customer routers and the S2 AWS Direct Connect location.

NextDC’s chief commercial officer David Dzienciol said the company was seeing demand for high-bandwidth, dedicated connectivity across media and entertainment, government, financial services, research institutions and other large organisations.

“NextDC is committed to providing the fastest and most reliable connections to the world’s leading cloud environments through services including AWS Direct Connect. We bring the cloud to our customers, and in doing so, we help them adopt new technology at pace and reduced costs, and with significantly improved performance.”

AWS Direct Connect is a cloud service that links a data centre directly to AWS to deliver consistent, secure, low-latency performance. Data that would have previously been transported over the internet is delivered through a private network connection between other facilities and AWS data centres.

The news follows NextDC's acquisition of a site in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, late last year where it plans to build a 1MW data centre. The company said that once built, the facility would be the first in what it is calling a new ‘edge data centre network’.