A former data center and disaster recovery facility in Sydney, Australia has been put up for sale.
The facility was previously owned by Australian bank Westpac.
As reported by ITnews, JLL is offering 26 Smith Street in the Chatswood area of Sydney for sale. A listing price wasn’t included.
Sat on a 5,644 sqm landholding, the five-story building was originally built in the early 1990s. From then until 2018, it operated as a data center. It was then refurbished to operate as a business continuity center for the bank.
The refurbishment to a recovery site included the recommissioning of backup diesel generators and uninterruptible power supplies, according to a case study by FDC. The site has ceiling heights ranging from 4.5-7m.
JLL notes the site’s redevelopment potential, highlighting that the site’s flexible E4 – General Industrial zoning allows for an “abundance” of alternate uses, that could yield up to 11,288 sqm of potential gross floor area (GFA).
“Extensive optionality available and perfectly positioned to be occupied, value added, re-positioned or re-developed to other uses such as; self-storage, data center, strata industrial, distribution center, or pharmaceutical (STCA),” the listing notes.
A Westpac spokesperson told ITnews the bank no longer needs the property and is looking to sell it.
JLL co-head of sales and investments NSW Gordon McFadyen told ITwire the site is “significantly underdeveloped” and offers the buyer the chance to unlock additional floor space.
“The building benefits greatly from ample floor-to-ceiling height slab to slab, providing the opportunity to further adapt the current floor plates or expand the existing footprint by utilizing the additional GFA”.
Westpac announced a new cloud strategy in 2018, which it called a ‘hybrid-platform-as-a-service.’ The strategy intended to use a combination of public and private cloud environments, hosted by IBM. According to an article released in 2019, the private cloud environments were hosted in Westpac’s two Sydney data centers.
The company then announced a five-year agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) last year; it had been working with the cloud provider since 2015. The bank also utilizes Microsoft Azure.
