Regional carrier Pacnet revealed plans for a new data center Thursday – its second in Hong Kong, its fourth in the region, and the third to be collocated with one of its cable landing station facilities.
The new Tier-3 data landing station (DLS), which is scheduled to open for business in December this year, will be carrier-neutral and feature 800 high power density racks with IT power of 3 MW in the initial phase.
It will also be constructed at Pacnet’s existing EAC-1 cable landing station in Tseung Kwan O, offering data center customers direct connectivity to Pacnet’s EAC-C2C subsea cable network.
Pacnet also says the Hong Kong DLS will be the first facility in the SAR to attain LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, and international certification program for green-building performance standards.
The latest DLS is part of Pacnet’s plan – unveiled last year – to expand its hosting and colocation infrastructure to meet demand for data center and cloud services in the Asia-Pacific, said CEO Bill Barney.
“We're on track with our plan to build eight data centers in two years,” Barney told a press gathering in Hong Kong Thursday.
Pacnet launched DLS facilities in Hong Kong and Singapore in November 2010. It also launched a data center in Sydney’s CDB in February this year.
Barney said that Pacnet had several distinct advantages in the increasingly competitive data center space in Hong Kong, such as direct connectivity to its EAC-C2C system and the fact that its facilities are better designed for the current cloud environment.
“Many of the data centers here were built ten years ago, and they were originally designed either as disaster recovery centers or as telecom hotels,” he said. “But today data centers now serve as the core of the Internet. So there’s a real opportunity there for us to come in with new types of centers that can deal with new types of applications.”
Barney added that the cloud computing market for Asia has accelerated greatly thanks more to consumer apps – especially from 3G and smartphones – than from the MNC sector as many industry players initially expected.
However, he added, “There’s a lot going on in the enterprise space driving data center demand – it’s the only area in the telecoms industry where prices [for data center space] are going up dramatically.”
The Asia-Pacific data center and web hosting market is forecast by Gartner to grow from $2 billion in 2010 to $4.5 billion by 2015 at a CAGR of 14.3%.