Digital Realty Expands Sydney Data Center Campus

By Tudor Scolca

Digital Realty has opened Digital Erskine Park II in western Sydney. The company’s newest data center campus is set to eventually provide 17.4 megawatts of critical IT power, deployed in several phases. The facility is Digital Realty’s fifth Australian data center.

Along with bringing the new data center online, Digital Realty also acquired an additional 1.4-hectare (3.5-acre) land parcel in the Erskine Park area, which will be used to develop a sixth, 12-megawatt facility. These recent developments bring the company’s total investment in Australia to approximately $726.4 million (AU$1 billion).

“Sydney’s status as a global hotspot for innovation, and a key city for multinationals as they touch down into the Asia Pacific region, makes it a critically important destination for us. This facility will serve the community as well as a strong addition to Sydney’s data and technology infrastructure, which is increasingly under-resourced due to the rapid growth of inbound business and the regional digital economy,” said Digital Realty CEO William Stein, in a prepared statement.

Connected campus

Digital Erskine Park II is located adjacent to the company’s other Sydney facility, at 13-23 Templar Road, in the Erskine Park suburb. The new data center currently has 9 megawatts available. The 75,347-square-foot (7,000-square-meter), two-story facility includes 14,000 square feet of storage and office space. Digital Realty implemented its trademarked 4.0 POD Architecture design, which relies on prefabricated pieces of equipment, shaving weeks off construction time and reducing costs.

Digital Erskine Park II complements the company’s existing 6-megawatt campus, comprising four data centers interconnected by dark fiber. The company houses the largest Internet Exchange (IX) in Australia at Erskine Park, also to be connected to the newly opened facility and to the upcoming Digital Erskine Park III. The data centers rely on a waterless cooling method which utilizes a pumped refrigerate economizer cycle, contributing to both a low power usage effectiveness (PUE) and a low carbon footprint. Lithium ion batteries are used instead of traditional lead acid ones, improving performance.

“Sydney is ideally placed on the Eastern Seaboard, with the fiber optic backbone that runs up through Brisbane and Queensland, and down to Canberra and Melbourne. It picks up a large part of the Australian population and is strategically located along submarine fiber cable routes,” said Peter Adcock, Digital Realty vice president of design and construction for Asia Pacific, in a prepared statement.

Continued growth

Digital Erskine Park III is also in the works, with the company expecting to begin the design and planning phase soon. Incremental capacity will be added starting with 2020 at the third facility, scaling according to customer demand. Digital Realty stated that it will employ up to 500 contractors for construction and, upon completion, 30 permanent jobs will be added at Digital Erskine Park III.

This year was a busy one for the second-largest U.S. data center REIT. In September, the company teamed up with an affiliate of Brookfield Asset Management to expand into Brazil, via the $1.8 billion acquisition of Ascenty, a local data center provider. Digital Realty also announced plans of expanding its already large Northern Virginia footprint by acquiring 424 acres of undeveloped land in Loudoun County for $236.5 million. Since 2007, when it first broke ground in the world’s largest data center market, Digital Realty invested approximately $1.3 billion in the region.

Images courtesy of Digital Realty