Tier Three Plus sets up colo in NEC's Polaris space

Tier Three Plus has set up a new colocation facility in Brisbane's Polaris data centre using space sub-let from NEC Australia.

Director John Fewster told iTnews the space was available in allocations as little as a single rack without the requirement to submit to a long-term lease arrangement for the space.

Fewster said that the company had launched with a "half dozen tenants" and had been fielding more inquiries since soft-launching Tier Three Plus last week.

It was the first time that colo space had been offered within Polaris to smaller companies.

"We've been getting a lot of inquiries from smaller companies who saw the value of trying to get into Polaris," Fewster said.

"The problem was that unless you were going to lease 100 square metres of space in Polaris, you couldn't get in there."

Tier Three's external CIO Mike Andrea said the company introduced more flexibility for smaller businesses to Polaris.

Andrea – also a director of Strategic Directions, the designers of Polaris – has been retained to provide the IT staff resources for Tier Three Plus.

"Everything in the IT space Mike and his team will handle," Fewster said.

Tier Three Plus had signed a "flexible sub-lease arrangement" with NEC Australia rather than taking data centre space from Polaris directly.

Fewster said the space deal had been agreed "at a wholesale rate".

"It's not a margin-on-margin type of play," he said. "Our overheads are low. We also charge [customers] per kilowatt [of power used] as opposed to charging in square metres".

Alex Gatiragas, general manager of managed services solutions at NEC Australia told iTnews that subleasing the space to Tier Three Plus gave NEC an "opportunity to take another part of the market" that the Japanese vendor's direct sales force didn't target.

NEC Australia had previously run into some trouble shifting its space allocation at Polaris and had recently refocused on managed services.

Polaris was one of a number of Queensland data centres to escape the recent flooding in Queensland.