Data centre and cloud computing vendor Rackspace is considering locating its second Australian data centre in Melbourne for disaster recovery and growth opportunities.
Texas-based president and CEO Taylor Rhodes told CIO Australia that he visited Australia to do a study of the data centre market.
Once the study is complete, the vendor will then make a decision about whether to build in Melbourne.
“We have a facility [in Sydney] and as we sell business, our facility fills up and our power consumption goes up. We will look at best options for the next expansion and Melbourne is one of those options because it will give us disaster recovery and potentially opens up the Melbourne market,” said Rhodes.
According to the Australia and New Zealand director and general manager, Angus Dorney, there is more room for growth in the data centre and cloud computing markets, especially as mainstream cloud adoption hits Australia.
Rackspace has signed up a number of local customers including Kogan, Pacific Brands and the New South Wales and Victorian governments.
While Melbourne might be on the cards for a data centre, Rackspace was not looking to ride the mining wave and set up a facility in Perth, Dorney said.
“Perth is not an area we’ve looked at for a data centre presence. We would put service delivery and account management staff in there [Perth] before a data centre,” said Dorney.
According to Rhodes, Australian enterprise cloud adoption is amongst “the fastest” he has ever seen.
“One of the reasons Australia went to the public cloud is that people have a lot of experience with virtualization and operating virtualized workloads was very natural,” he said.
Over 50 per cent of 315 CIOs and IT executives surveyed by analyst firm Telsyte are now using public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), according to its <i>Australian Infrastructure & Cloud Computing Market Study 2014</i> released in June 2014.
The study found that there was a rise in adoption during 2013 as more local cloud service providers emerged.
The study also found that the public cloud IaaS market in Australia is currently worth $305 million, with Telsyte forecasting it will rise to $650 million by 2018 as more CIOs use a mix of public and hybrid cloud services. For example, 30 per cent of the 315 CIOs surveyed indicated that they were using hybrid cloud.
However, Rhodes admitted that recent events such as the Apple iCloud hack had raised the concerns of CIOs.
“[Cloud] security will remain a big driver, as it should. Over time, I think CIOs will opt for a hybrid model made up of private cloud and public cloud. Public cloud is where they will test and develop cloud applications,” he said.
According to Rhodes, the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007-2010 helped cloud computing adoption in the United States.
“It [the GFC] really put a crunch on a lot of IT budgets and clearly a lot of staff and data centres were affected. As productivity is a big requirement and budgets are low, cloud models are a good tool."
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