Equinix is expanding its Singapore data centre by injecting another US$28.5 million into it and increasing the number of cabinets to 3,256 to cater to growing demand for cloud-based services and financial services.
This is the company’s fourth phase of its SG2 business exchange and is expected to boost the capacity for more online services, when the additions to the data centre go online by the end of 2012, Equinix said today.
Singapore is already home to about 50 per cent of the Southeast Asian region’s data capacity, according to the company, and the expansion is aimed at taking advantage of the country’s hub status.
Equinix itself is located near to Singapore’s Mediapolis cluster of media-related companies, and it wants to serve some of these customers which are expected to transfer, store and crunch enormous amounts of data.
Among Equinix’s list of customers so far are web hosting firm Go Daddy and cloud player Unitas Global. Equinix has also recently been expanding its data centres in Asia, Europe and the United States.
In many cases it is about access to the markets, and latency can be an important issue.
For example, if your customers are in the financial sector and you need to send information to them (e.g. in stock trades) latency is a key issue, and you want your data centre to be as close to the action as possible.
I’ve been wondering about this and thought I’d ask you – do you know how much of a Singapore data centre’s budget is spent on cooling? Given our weather, the increasing cost of electricity, and the trend by some large firms to open data centres in colder regions such as Scandinavia, I wonder about the long-term viability of data centres in Singapore. What do you think?
Hi Harminder, that’s a good point. I don’t have the numbers on that. It’s true other data centres around the world are increasingly looking for interesting locales that come with natural cooling, which Singapore cannot offer. I guess the attraction of placing the data here is the same as that with placing money here – the stable and predictable political system and safety from almost any natural disaster. But you’re right – the heat here and the costs in cooling may just figure in a decision to base here in future.