Cloud Hosting Firm Rackspace to Open Sydney Data Center in December

Cloud hosting provider Rackspace announced on Wednesday that it will open a data center in Sydney, Australia by the end of the year.

This announcement comes two months after Amazon launched an edge location in Sydney.

Sydney is a key financial center in Asia-Pacific, and with its new data center in Erskine Park, Rackspace will be better equipped to serve its cloud customers in the region, which are already served out of its Hong Kong data center.

A report by PC World indicates that part of the reason for the expansion was to comply with Australia’s privacy laws, which aim to ensure data can not be accessed by overseas third parties without fulfilling Australian legal obligations.

“Rackspace will not transfer customer owned data from our Australia data center to a law enforcement agency of another country (including the United States) without a customer’s consent unless it is compelled to do so by Australian law,” Alan Schoenbaum, general counsel, Rackspace said. “Data hosted in Australia by Rackspace is subject to the same laws as cloud services operated by wholly owned Australian companies.”

The high costs of bandwidth in Australia mean Rackspace will have to charge more. Rackspace tells ZDNet that it will have a “very transparent pricing model” around bandwidth to show how much is included.

While Rackspace has focused a lot of momentum around its Open Cloud offerings recently, the Sydney data center will not offer its OpenStack cloud services initially, though the suite will be available in the few months after it goes live in December. At first, managed virtualization and dedicated hosting will be available for customers from the 3,444 square feet of raised floor.

The data center is being built by Digital Realty, and the facility’s construction and staffing is expected to create up to 50 new jobs in Western Sydney, according to PC World. Rackspace employed 4,528 “Rackers” as of June 30, 2012, according to its quarterly earnings call at the beginning of August.

The Sydney data center adds to Rackspace’s eight existing facilities in Dallas, Virginia, Chicago, Hong Kong and London.

Rackspace has built the data center to meet LEED Gold standard, according to its website. Recently Equinix received LEED Gold Certification for its Mascot, Sydney data center.

Talk back: What do you think of Rackspace’s plans to open a Sydney data center? Do you offer cloud services in Sydney? Let us know in a comment. 

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/cloud-hosting-firm-rackspace-to-open-sydney-data-center-in-december