Macquarie Telecom’s Sydney co-location Intellicentre 3 (IC3) datacentre campus at Macquarie Park is getting an $80 million upgrade as the broad migration to the cloud continues at pace.
Cloud and hyperscale consumption by both enterprise and government had underpinned the expansion, Macquarie chief executive David Tudehope said told InnovationAus.com.
“We have had excellent demand for the collocation business with lots of cloud companies moving in both at IC2 as well as our other datacentre, IC1, and that has really given us the confidence to invest in IC3,” Mr Tudehope said.
“We have also seen an increase in demand for our public cloud services, which is VMware-based, and private cloud where we have a lot of large clients, such as BPay, and we see the market continuing in that direction.
“We’re also focused on government cloud adoption and enabling government in the cloud space where their security matters even more so than the private sector.”
The expansion of the facility would occur in stages. The existing IC3 East building is to receive a capacity boost from 10MW to 26MW, and a further 17MW would be added as part of the build-out of IC3 West. The first data hall on the campus is expected to be completed late 2019.
Once the site is complete, Macquarie Telecom plans to extend its Australian Signals Directorate-certified ‘Protected’ cloud facility to the IC3.
“The government’s digital transformation has really stimulated demand for cloud by government agencies. They’re become more agile, they’re focused on flexibility because government does move quite quickly, and that suits cloud really well,” Mr Tudehope said.
“The challenge though is that what they do involves sensitive data and therefore security really does matter. Our focus has been on providing secure cloud, rather than just cloud.”
According to the company, it would also be built to Australian government physical security standards, ISO 27001:2013, and have a power usage effectiveness (PUE) number of 1.28.
“The government security standards have been very good for us. Although they’re demanding and they’re not easily met, they have forced us to have good processes and structure in the way we manage our operations and also forces us to really focus on the physical security standards when building datacentres,” said Mr Tudehope.
The expansion of IC3 is expected to cost the company between $75 million and $80 million. However, the company said the capex will be offset by a fee, valued from of $26 million to $36 million, paid by collocation partner Keppel DC REIT for the development of IC3 core and building shell.
Macquarie Telecom would enter a 20-year lease with Keppel including options to renew.
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