Kennards Self Storage has purchased the Westpac Sydney data center-turned disaster recovery site for AU$23.05m (US$15.11m).

Put up for sale in March 2024, the site is located at 26 Smith Street in the Chatswood area of Syndey, Australia.

Kennards will be repurposing the facility yet again, reports Real Estate Source.

Sat on a 5,644 sqm (60,752 sq ft) landholding, the five-story building was originally built in the early 1990s and operated as a data center until 2018. It was then refurbished and used as a business continuity center by 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.

Additionally, the property has a loading dock and 600 workstations in the office area.

"The purchase is a good example of adaptive reuse of an obsolete building with tremendous inherent value," said Harry Sullivan, a marketing agent at JLL, which listed the property.

The property is zoned as "general industrial," and has a potential gross floor area of 11,288 sqm (121,503 sq ft).

Sullivan noted that the property comes with a "high-spec fit out, substantial power infrastructure, and high-value plant, and equipment."

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.

Kennards Self Storage operates another facility in the Chatswood suburb, on Mann Street.