Harbour MSP and E3 build Melbourne data centre

Frontline Systems' Harbour MSP to open 500-rack facility.

Hosting provider Harbour MSP will build a 1000 square metre Tier III data centre with E3 Networks in Port Melbourne, Victoria.

It will provide Harbour MSP - owned by Sun reseller Frontline Systems - with a Victorian presence alongside racks in Sydney's Global Switch and Equinix data centres and in Singapore.

The Port Melbourne site has access to fibre networks from Telstra, Nextgen and Optus' Uecomm. It is expected to be wired up to a power substation when it opens in December. A second substation will be connected next March.

The two companies will kit the data centre out with generators and uninterruptible power supplies to meet a Tier III rating.

It will have standard racks of 3kW plus separate suites of APC in-row cooled pods offering up to of 35kW a rack.

Harbour MSP commercial director Andrew Hardy said it took three years to find Melbourne data centre space.

"There is such a lack of quality data centre space in Melbourne," he said. "There is something like 60,000 square metres of commercially available space in Sydney, either built or planned, but very little in Melbourne."

After false starts on potential sites, Harbour MSP hired E3 Networks, which last December completed its own data centre in the bayside suburb that is used by Pipe Networks and Intervolve.

Hardy said he was impressed that E3 had "executed on three or four boutique data centres in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane".

He said Harbour MSP anticipated that many of Frontline Systems' 200 Victorian customers would take racks in its new data centre.

It was looking to invest in a 10 Gigabit Ethernet link between its Sydney and Melbourne sites for data replication and disaster recovery services.

And it was considering moving some of its secondary disaster recovery racks from either Equinix or Global Switch into the E3 Sydney data centre.

"It's better not to have all your eggs in one basket," Hardy said.