Photos: Pacnet opens new Sydney data centre

Pacnet has opened the first stage of a new $40 million carrier-neutral data centre in Sydney's CBD that replaced an older facility in nearby Bond Street.

Linked gallery: Inside Pacnet's new Sydney CBD data centre

Site contractors FDC Construction and Fitout handed over the first of three data floors to Pacnet this morning.

The first stage had a 200 rack capacity over 550 square metres of hosting and co-location space and cost $14 million to build.

Pacnet had leased two upper floors in the building and also had a lease option on a fourth floor for further expansion.

The company was in the process of migrating customer equipment out of its Bond Street facility into the new site.

The equipment migration was expected to be completed by 20 March.

Pacnet's A/NZ chief Deborah Homewood said that the company reviewed its options after the lease expired on Bond Street.

It settled on the Commonwealth Bank's old outsourced data centre, which had originally been operated by EDS but had been vacant for some time.

Pacnet gutted the interior and was in the process of completely refurbishing it to bring it up to date.

The data centre location will also house a back-up network operations centre due to open later this week.

The NOC will act as a support site for Pacnet's main NOC facility in Singapore.

Pacnet's chief Bill Barney outlined the company's long-term strategy to own – rather than lease – its data centre assets.

Sydney was the third location for a Pacnet-owned data centre in the Asia Pacific. The company planned to open another 10 or more between now and 2012.

At least one of the new Pacnet-owned facilities would be a 'gravity centre' – essentially a high-density operation, most likely to be built in Hong Kong.

The strategy, however, meant that Pacnet was likely to pursue a long-term strategy in Sydney that could see it replace other leased space – such as in Global Switch – with another of its own facilities.

"We want to own the infrastructure," Pacnet's vice president of data centre services Martin Slater told iTnews.

"The intention over the course of the next few years is to bring it under our own umbrella."

(All photos taken by iTnews photographer Josh Lundberg).