A few weeks ago I got a chance to check out the 
Global Switch data center in Sydney, Australia. Very impressive place.
First off, the location is about a 10 minute walk from the central business district of Sydney and a few hundred meters from Darling Harbour (tourist mecca). Not exactly a low-rent location or the most intuitive place to find high-end high-volume data center infrastructure.
Turns out the building historically served the wool industry as an inspection warehouse and was up for sale and was bought and retrofitted by the Global Switch team into a world-class data center. Again, not your typical estate choice for high-end DC infrastructure.
So many things impressed me with this building and stand out from most data centers you see:
- Multiple floors – this place is a serious four-layer cake of raised-floor data center space, the place is BUZZING with white noise and ‘electric hum’ as they put it. You’re average data center is a single floor in a building, or a building built to purpose for data centers, but rarely an entire building retro-fitted into multiple floors of data center. Interesting architecture and design and not a trivial feat of engineering to pull it off.
- Lease Holders Only- only available to DC ‘lease owners’ or systems integrator/technology businesses and not to direct customers. Reminds me of feudal Europe land ownership where the Kings grant the land, the Nobility set land owners setup the roles, and then lease to the serfs on conditions and terms specific to their space. This is a really good way to keep the riff-raff out of the facilities and run a ‘tight ship’ so to speak from a security point of view.
- Metro location – literally in the heart of a major metro area city, not in the low-cost outskirts like most data centers old and new. Plus, would a data center metro support production or DR or both? Both- which is really interesting given the proximity to the city.
