Big Blue says its Nextgen data centre is Queensland today, Perth the next

It's IBM's third east-coast disaster recovery lease; it runs dual data centres in Sydney and Melbourne.

The suite within Nextgen has a 150-rack capacity and is connected via a high-speed link to a nearby IBM workplace-recovery site, which also has a data centre.

It will host production and disaster-recovery equipment and services for IBM clients and shared-services offerings such as virtual server recovery.

"We've allocated 10 racks to shared services and the rest for clients' production or (disaster recovery) hosting needs," said Andrew Fry, business development executive for global technology services at IBM.

"I'd call it a draft split because we'll likely change the allocation depending on demand".

Fry said that the financial services industry is a big user of dual-facility disaster recovery and business continuity services but that mid-market firms are becoming interested.

A typical strategy might see a business customer use its own server room or data centre as the primary facility, the IBM/Nextgen suite as a secondary disaster recovery site and IBM's nearby workplace recovery centre to enable staff to continue to work if the usual business address is out of action.

Customers had been forced to rely on these strategies when visiting world leaders put parts of Sydney in lockdown, Fry said.

But the space was often used for overflow or to house contractors working on short-term projects.

Fry said it is unlikely that IBM will extend the dual-facility model to Adelaide. "We've got more capacity available and the demand probably isn't there yet," he said.

It will consider extending the strategy to Perth in the long-term but will concentrate on building a new primary data centre there first.

"We plan to invest in a new 500 square metre tier-three facility and 300 workplace recovery positions in Perth by the second half of 2010," Fry said.

The site will be built "from the ground up".

"We're in talks with developers right now," he said.