Dell’s Australian data centre coming soon: Kremer

No opening date or site location disclosed but A/NZ MD says a facility won’t be a long time away

Hamish Barwick (Computerworld)
30 August, 2012 11:12
Comments

Dell Australia and New Zealand managing director, Joe Kremer, has confirmed at a quarterly business briefing in Sydney that its planned Australian data centre won’t be a “long time away”.

Kremer told analysts and press that the vendor had launched data centre capabilities in Massachusetts, US and Slough, UK and while he did not have a formal announcement to make for Australia, he did say that a data centre would not be a long time away from completion.

“You can anticipate that with the facilities we have stood up in other parts of the world you can see the direction we are going in,” Kremer said.

In-depth: Data centre migration guide.

In August 2011, Kremer said that the company was currently investigating sites for the data centre -- he would not name the state the data centre would reside in -- and was hiring staff for a cloud services team.

At the time, he said the company would use the data centre to provide co-location and data centre hosting services for local customers as well as a cloud-based on-demand storage service.

The data centre would accommodate customers with the vendor’s own hardware as well as those wishing to relocate non-Dell hardware, and offer the same service levels to both, depending on the capabilities of rival hardware.

News of Dell’s Aussie data centre first arose in March 2011 when Dell company chief executive, Michael Dell, told some media outlets during a flying visit to Australia that the vendor would be building a facility.

At the time, Michael Dell said that while some of its local partners such as Tier 5, were looking after customer data centre needs, market demand dictated that the company build one.

In April that year, a Dell Australia spokesperson confirmed that a data centre would be built “in country” while a solutions centre was planned for Sydney.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU, or take part in the Computerworld conversation on LinkedIn: Computerworld Australia