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Pacnet is spending $32 million upgrading its 200 rack data centre in Sydney and adding a further 700 racks taking it to a 3 MW Tier III facility. The company says its clients in the cloud hosting data centre are all under non-disclosure agreements but are mainly in the technology, new media and gaming sectors.
Although Pacnet takes all its power off the electricity grid, being unconvinced of the benefits of co-generation in a CBD setting, Mr Barney did not believe rising electricity costs would impact the company’s business model in Australia. “It won’t move the meter that much” he said.
However he did question whether Australia’s unilateral approach with a carbon tax would place the country at a disadvantage when trying to attract investment from companies which could consider locating in other jurisdictions which did not have a carbon tax.
Mr Barney said the bigger problem for data centres or cloud computing vendors setting up shop in Australia was instead the high cost of international networking. He said that the cost of international communications using the Endeavour or Southern Cross submarine cables was 20 times as expensive as using cables across the Atlantic.
That translated into higher prices for end users according to Mr Barney. He said there was a 30-40 per cent premium paid by Australian users compared to the prices paid by Pacnet customers in other parts of the world.
