Equinix Opens SY5 Sydney Data Centre

By Sasha Karen
November 13, 2019

Data centre operator Equinix has opened its eighth international business exchange (IBX) data centre in Sydney, SY5, and is already hosting infrastructure for other businesses.

The Alexandria-based data centre is the operator’s largest in Australia to date and contains an initial capacity of 1,825 cabinets.

When completed, it will have a total colocation space of approximately 25,000 square metres and 9,225 cabinets.

SY5 offers multiple connectivity options to users, one of which being Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric, allowing for connections to be made to providers including Alibaba, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, SAP Cloud, Oracle and SoftLayer.

Network edge services are also available, allowing for businesses to deploy network function virtualisation from multiple vendors to digital supply chains.

SY5 is interconnected to the other seven IBX data centres, having access to more than 160 network service providers, 280 cloud and information technology (IT) service providers, over 75 financial services businesses and more than 60 content and digital media organisations.

Users can also set up direct links from Australia to New Zealand, US, Fiji, Guam, American Samoa, Hawaii and Singapore via the Southern Cross Cable, PIPE Network's PIPE Pacific Cable, the Hawaiki Submarine Cable and Vocus Group's Australia Singapore Cable.

Businesses that have already chosen SY5 to host their infrastructure include Servers Australia and AnyCast Networks.

The establishment of SY5 is part of Equinix’s investment of nearly $750 million to build or expand projects in key metropolitan areas across the Asia Pacific region, with projects planned for Sydney, Melbourne and Perth in Australia, as well as Hong Kong, Osaka, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo.

Jeremy Deutsch, president of Asia Pacific at Equinix, said the operator is looking to “continuously evolving our services to interconnect our customers at the digital edge, a critical part of digital transformation efforts of many enterprises, cloud providers and network providers”.