Equinix sets new ME1 capacity live

Equinix has laid the finishing touches on a $37 million program of work to more than double the capacity of its ME1 Port Melbourne data centre.

The expansion of its only Victorian facility has been on the cards since ME1 opened its doors in early 2015. The upgrades mean the site has increased its hosting capacity from 375 cabinets and 17,900 square feet of floorspace to 1125 cabinets and 35,790 square feet of floorspace.

At full capacity, the facility has room to house a total 1500 cabinets.

Equinix said the ME1 investment should deliver reduced IP transit costs to its ISP and content provider customers thanks to its internet exchange service, which aggregates thousands of peering sessions onto a shared fabric to achieve economies of scale.

ME1 already houses Equinix customers like Telstra, Vocus, Bulletproof, Microsoft and Symantec, plus dozens of others. Its Sydney sites deliver local capacity for public cloud giant AWS.

The global data centre giant recently added Yarra City Council to its list of clients. The inner Melbourne local government organisation plans to have moved all its existing on-premise infrastructure into ME1 by 2017, and is expecting savings of $1775 per month on its power consumption as a result.

Yarra City will consume Microsoft Azure and Office 365 services from the facility, which will also act as its disaster recovery site. Yarrra’s innovation manager Rick Bottliglieri said the move will form the foundation of its “cloud-first” innovation strategy.

ME1 is the fourth in Equinix’s Australian data centre fleet, which will soon welcome a fifth site - SY4 - currently under construction in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria. SY4 is expected to cost $121 million to complete.