Cloud Hosting

An artist's impression of the new Rackspace data centre under construction in Sydney.

Cloud hosting provider Rackspace is opening a multimillion-dollar data centre in Sydney to cater for Australian businesses intent on keeping their information firmly within the country's boundaries.

The facility in Erskine Park in Sydney's west is one of many springing up in Australia. It will open later this year, with Australia and New Zealand country manager Mark Randall confident it will fulfil existing high demand for onshore cloud computing services. The term cloud computing describes third-party computing resources that can be scaled up and down as needs change.

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of Amazon.com, recently announced an Australian site for some of its services. HP opened a data centre in Sydney's west, while Fujitsu is upgrading its facilities in Perth.

The Rackspace facility under construction in Sydney's Erskine Park. Surrounding vacant land could be used for further expansion, the company said.

Mr Randall said demand was coming from all business sectors, from small businesses to corporate and financial institutions and government agencies.

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"They just prefer to have their hosting onshore for whatever reason," he said. "We've seen [the demand] in the past three years and not been able to address it. Occasionally some [clients] went out [the door] because they were mandated to have data in Australia.

"It's not something we wanted to ever leave unaddressed."

Mark Randall, country manager Australia and New Zealand, Rackspace. Photo: Supplied

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