VentraIP shifts racks out of Global Switch

VentraIP has moved its Sydney racks out of Global Switch to escape space constraints and onerous new rules introduced by the facility in July.

The web host transported its kit from the Pipe Networks suite in Global Switch to Pipe's data centre at the PPC-1 cable landing station in Sydney's north earlier this week.

It signed on as an anchor tenant in the facility and took on significantly more space.

VentraIP chief Cheyne Jonstone told iTnews the company had exhausted its rack space allocation at Global Switch and was unable to secure more at the centre.

Jonstone also said that recent access rule changes were "not going to work for what we do".

The changes included 48 hours advance notice to apply for a permit to work, at least 48 hours notice of delivery times and dates, and the need for all staff to be re-inducted.

"Before the rule changes it was bad enough," Jonstone said.

"Things like having to request access more than 24 hours in advance - it was already almost military-style.

"The most recent changes came in requiring two days notice and saying you can't take things through the front doors. Trying to find parking there [was already a problem]. Outside is a clearway for most of the day and down the back, there's no customer parking.

"This was not going to work for what we do. We don't do mass scale deployment of hardware - we add it in as we need it."

Jonstone said VentraIP had its migration process planned "weeks in advance" and "tied down to the minute".

"It was all good until we started to remove the servers and forgot how fiddly it is to unscrew server rails," he said.

"It actually took a lot longer than we thought it would - and the server rails were the first time waster."

Jonstone said physically moving the servers from Ultimo in inner Sydney to the Northern beaches didn't cause issue due to the middle-of-night timing.

But the company had some connectivity issues which took "two-to-three hours" to repair and had since also fixed routing issues for Internode traffic.

Ventra-IP also used the move to make some changes to its core network, switching out WatchGuard firewalls for Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASAs).

"We've decided to go for Cisco appliances now because we use Cisco routing gear and switches - [so we're] keeping it in the family," Jonstone said.

Jonstone said VentraIP planned to take advantage of the range of carriers coming into PPC-1 as well as more of PPC-1 itself.

VentraIP was on the verge of launching a United States-based company, which Jonstone said would happen "within weeks".

"The plan with that is to have our own kit to replace leased kit within six months and to use the Guam [PPC-1] cable to connect to the point-of-presence in Los Angeles," he said.