Jabez Tan on the Australian data centre colocation market

• September 6, 2017

Source: Data Economy

Structure Research data points to Sydney as being one of the top four data centre markets in the Asia Pacific region excluding China.

As for Melbourne, 2017 is projected to grow 10.9% over 2016, from $124.1m to $137.6m. Equally to Sydney, but only around one third of the Sydney market, Melbourne is expected to nearly double its colocation market size to $255m. 2020 is expected to deliver the highest growth at 17% ($218.7m).

Overall and as a matter of comparison, the data centre colocation market size of the ANZ region (Australia + New Zealand) is estimated to be worth today $651m. This is projected to double in size by 2020 according to Structure Research’s global colocation market share database.

At the end of 2016, when combined, Sydney and Melbourne offered a data centre capacity of 1.8 million sqf hosting 54,000 racks/cabinets powered by 197MW.

In total, the two regions accounted to 56 unique data centre services providers and 72 unique operational data centres.

Major players include Equinix, Global Switch, Fujitsu, Keppel DC REIT, Digital Realty, DCI Data Centers, Telstra, Metronode, NextDC, Macquarie Telecom, AirTrunk, and Vocus Comunications.

Jabez Tan, Research Director, Data Centres at Structure Research, told Data Economy: “Australia is situated in a unique, pseudo-isolated geographical location where service providers have to deploy IT infrastructure in-country in order to serve Australian enterprises.

“Unlike Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo – the Sydney and Melbourne markets have plenty of available land to for new data centre builds and expansions though bandwidth costs are high compared to the other top APAC markets while power costs are increasing.

“Public cloud adoption and uptake is at a relatively mature stage in Australia and this has attracted sizable deployments from the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and we fully expect other massive-scale cloud providers like Google, IBM and Alibaba to deploy additional data centre capacity in Australia over the next two years.”

The Australian data centre market has over the past few weeks seen an increase in activity in the sector, from new builds to new boardroom appointments.