The Australian data centre market will be changed by the rise of cloud computing over the next five years according to Megaport founder Bevan Slattery.
Speaking at the CommsDay Wholesale and Data Centre Summit in Sydney, Slattery told delegates that by 2018 there will be more regional cloud data centres in Asia Pacific.
“Australia needs to think long and hard about what its role is going to be within this space because at the moment, the major regional players sit in Malaysia, Singapore or Hong Kong,” he said.
“The facilities are in these locations because of connectivity and stability."
According to Slattery, the government's proposed Internet filtering in Australia put companies off building cloud data centres here.
“There is 30 megawatts of IT load going into regional facilities in Singapore.”
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He also forecast that data centre operators will start expanding beyond their walls and become network operators.
For example, operators such as Equinix may take their ecosystem and place it into other data centres.
“Good data centres have strong ecosystems and publicly listed companies are going to try and find ways in which to expand that.”
Slattery added that co-location data centres will remain strong.
However, large scale white space providers with one or two customers will come under pressure.
“There is going to be a lot of empty space in these facilities and they are going to try and figure out how to sweat that asset,” he said. “Within two years, some [data centre] cages will be down to 35 square metres.”
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