Fairfax shifts data centre to Equinix

Fairfax Media will move all of its business systems into an Equinix data centre in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria by the end of July this year, in an effort to reduce the costs of operating its own facility.

In an internal email sighted by iTnews, Fairfax chief information officer Andrew Lam-Po-Tang today notified staff the company had directed existing data centre vendor Hostworks to shift its 100+ business systems out of its current Pyrmont data centre and into Equinix's Alexandra facility.

Lam-Po-Tang told staff the replacement of a “significant fixed cost commitment with the flexibility to reduce our footprint and cost base further” would likely save Fairfax more than $3 million over the next four years.

Most of the systems are expected to be migrated into the Equinix facility by 31 July 2014, he said.

“As part of the transformation program we continue to look for ways to variablise our technology cost base while still implementing world class technology solutions,” Lam-Po-Tang told staff.

“Even though a big part of our strategy is to move our systems to cloud services we still have a large portfolio of on-premise systems housed in our own data centres.”

Equinix’s Sydney data centre ecosystem includes three data centres sitting side by side, the newest of which, SYD3, opened in 2011.

Fairfax jumped aboard the cloud bandwagon in 2012, shifting around 10,500 employee email accounts to Google Apps for Business as part of a 24-week project. Lam-Po-Tang mandated that staff use the Gmail, Contacts and Calendar applications, while Google apps such as Drive and Google+ remain optional.

Fairfax still retains a number of Microsoft Office licenses on a needs basis, but Lam-Po-Tang recently said he would continue to push employees towards the Google productivity suite.

More to come...