Managed cloud provider Rackspace has announced a new data center and an expansion of its existing Sydney flagship site, to meet demand in Australia and New Zealand.

The new site will be in Equinix’ Sydney campus, presumably in the SY3 building shown above, and not in the recently announced SY4 which is still being built. Meanwhile the company’s main Australian site at Erskine Park, Sydney (below)  will be extended with a new data hall, expected to open in September. 

rackspace sydney
Rackspace Sydney – Rackspace

Keeping data onshore

“Our new data centre is designed to give local customers optimal performance for their hosted data backup and failover requirements,” said Angus Dorney, general manager and director, Rackspace Australia and New Zealand. Customers iin the region want to keep data local, Rackspace said. 

The new environment will also offer better backup and redundancy options, with customers now being able to set their own recovery point objective - so backup either occurs immediately or at a specified frequency, the announcement promised. 

The new site supports Rackspace private cloud options including those based on VMware, Microsoft and OpenStack. 

One of the first into the new site is peer-to-peer lending firm SocietyOne. ”It is critical for our business to have a serious cloud hosting partner that will support us through our next phase of growth,” said SocietyOne co-founder Greg Symons. “Rackspace’s managed service model gives us the service levels we need without the overheads.”

Both announcements show Rackspace in good health in the region, said Dorney: “Rackspace opened its Sydney data centre in 2013 and since then we have grown the size of the Australia office and increased our customer count in the region.”