Google started the building of a new data centre in Singapore on Thursday, a US$120 million facility which represents the Internet giant’s expansion of operations in the region.

“More users are coming online in Asia than anywhere else in the world,” said Julian Persaud, head of Google Southeast Asia at a launch event. Projected to go online in 2013, the new data centre promises to serve this growing demand by delivering fast and reliable access to Google services.

In addition, the data centre will boost the local job market in a small way, as Google is hiring a small team of full-time staff as well as a number of contractors in a variety of roles, including computer technicians, electrical and mechanical engineers, and catering and security staff. …

The cloud infrastructure market in Singapore and the Asia Pacific region is heating up.

Savvis, a primarily US-based IT-services company that is looking to aggressively expand in Asia Pacific, is set to launch their virtual private data centre solution (VPDC) next month here in Singapore.

In a regional Asia Pacific market crowded with cloud infrastructure players — like new player Tata, commodity cloud incumbent Amazon, and IT behemoth IBM out of several others — what makes Savvis’ new Symphony VPDC play stand out?

Bryan Doerr, CTO of Savvis, pointed out two key points at the Asia Pacific Savvis Symphony VPDC media press luncheon this week: Security, and performance.

Savvis’ target audience is the enterprise customer, which Bryan defines as corporations who make “revenues of 200 million and upwards”. In other words, players like Amazon and Tata are not really full-on competitors, as their solutions attract the SMB and mid-sized crowd.

…

Networking company Juniper has released a new technology weapon — its Stratus QFabric switches and architecture — to conquer the core network switching space.

Released three days ago in late February 2011 in a worldwide launch, Juniper’s QFabric architecture is claimed by them to be a technologically superior way to implement network architectures, yielding both higher performance and significantly lower costs.

Lam Chee Keong, enterprise solutions manager for Asia Pacific at Juniper Networks explained that an ideal network architecture has a few key attributes like low latency, high reliability and scalability. These are typically implemented in a three tier networking framework, with core switches being surrounded by access switches and edge routers.

Juniper’s QFabric architecture aims to do away with this.

…