Box sets up shop in Sydney

Enterprise cloud storage provider Box has established a node in a Sydney data centre in a bid to increase the speed of file uploads to its international network.

The new node is one of nine established by the provider under its Accelerator program announced in the US overnight, allowing existing users to upload files to a node closer to the home office, rather than the company's US data centres.

The nodes, marketed as an "enterprise-grade global data transfer network" rather than traditional content delivery network, do not cache data.

Instead, the nodes act as a temporary upload point for local users, before the data is transferred to the core data centres.

Box's vice president of engineering, Sam Schillace, told ZDNet US that "there's no user data held at the nodes".

The company did not reveal the physical location of the Sydney node, and emails to Box executives went unanswered at the time of writing.

The service is notably used locally by REA Group, the company behind realestate.com.au.

Box claimed the nine new nodes would increase upload times by up to ten times.

However, a comparison of the service to its rivals, commissioned by the storage provider, found that the Sydney node continued to fall behind mainstay Google Drive.

A trial 25 MB upload at each of the nine locations found that in Sydney, Google Drive achieved an average upload of 54.4 seconds, while Box took 85.9 seconds.

Consumer-oriented Dropbox was slightly slower at 95.4 seconds, while Microsoft's competitor SkyDrive took 191.6 seconds to upload the same file.