Equinix SY5 in Sydney

Equinix, Inc.; a leading multinational company in the global colocation data center market, has just announced its plans to extend digital edge with a new International Business Exchange (IBX) data center SY5 in Sydney.

The data center which is code-named “SY5”, will be the largest for Equinix in Australia as of date.  SY5 is expected to accommodate a total of 9,225 cabinets and a total colocation space of about 25,000 square meters upon completion. As announced, this facility will give Equinix a national footprint of 16 IBX data centers across Sydney (having eight), Melbourne, Perth, Canberra, Adelaide and Brisbane.

The development of SY5 is in phases, and the first will be completed in Q3 2019. The budget for this phase is $160 million and it is expected to have an initial capacity of 1,825 cabinets. SY5 IBX will be located in Alexandria, which is about 2.5 miles from Sydney’s central business district and Equinix believes that the location and expansion will further strengthen Equinix’s market leadership in Australia.

Equinix seem to have chosen Sydney as the location for SY5 due to the density of carriers, cloud service providers (CSP) and subsea cables in South Sydney. Considering the year-on-year growth in cloud computing, big data, IoT applications and analytics software in Australia’s market, and with 5G which is expected this year, Equinix is prompted to expand its presence in Australia. They mentioned that this expansion will bring local and global businesses closer to the digital edge to support their digital transformation journeys.

According to Equinix, SY5 will be located adjacent to SY4 (finished in mid-2016 with over 12,600 meter square of colocation space) with direct physical access between the buildings through a secure link bridge, creating a physical campus extension between the sites. SY4 is also connected to SY1, SY2 and SY3 (2-storey building with 700 rack capacity) which are located 300 meters, 300 meters and 900 meters respectively, from SY4.

The SY5 IBX will also benefit from direct fiber cross connect capability between the SY1, SY2, SY3 and SY4 IBX data centers as this access will expose SY5 to Equinix’s richest ecosystem of customers in Australia, and to over 155 network service providers (NSP), 265 cloud and IT service providers, 75+ financial services companies and 55+ content and digital media organizations.

Just of recent, Equinix announced it is building its fourth IBX data center in Singapore and entering a new market in Seoul, South Korea.

As a leading data center service provider, Equinix IBX global facilities comprise of 200 IBX data centers across 52 markets, 24 countries and 5 continents, “providing data center and interconnection services for more than 9,800 of the world’s leading businesses” said Equinix.