News that the self-proclaimed Google “Duke of Data Centers” is in Australia holding some high level talks. Despite Google’s staunch “nether confirm nor deny” policy, some leaks seem to indicate potential for a Google data centre to be built in Australia.

Clearly Australasia is a little hamstrung partly by the latency issues caused by having most of our data sources on the other side of the world, but also because our content predominantly sits on the other side of the world. So potentially a local data centre could make life easier for us – depending on exactly what Google does with it’s data centres – if they used an Australasian data centre as a massive cache store – speeds here could be improved greatly.

There are potentially some implications for locally based data centres – with Google’s economies of scale where des it leave Australasian based business storage providers – with a much smaller customer base is the only conclusion I can come to.

The other question is what happens to the smattering of web services that the big telco’s provide? With localised (both faster and less jurisdictional concerns) and cheaper options they’ve got to be watching this one very carefully.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

4 Comments
  • It’s not all about “data centres” there are also “cache centres” – _maybe_ that’s what we’ll get here in NZ 😉

    As for Aus getting a data centre, I’m sure (with no proof) that that’s the case already

  • Honestly, I’d think Google would be more interested in placing the DC in NZ rather than Australia. Why? well – a few simple reasons 1) We have a lot more areas suited to hydro power – which is in line with their other DCs around the world. 2) These areas tend to be cooler than what would be found in Australia, thus less requirement for cooling. Proximity to power generation potential + less requirement for cooling sounds like a winner to me. Anyone able to convince me otherwise?

  • As far as I know there’s only two major issues:
    1: We only have 2 lines in/out – Google requires 4
    2: You can’t shoot people here

    But ‘1’ is being worked upon and ‘2’ can be worked around.

  • But Google is not currently a major supplier of data storage services. I doubt that having a local datacenter will significantly change the uptake of say, Google Docs. It’ll be a bit faster, but not so much as to make a huge difference. It’s pretty fast already, on modern browsers (nb: IE7 doesn’t count as a modern browser anymore). I think it would be a bit more significant for local business storage providers if Amazon decided to open an EC2/S3 data center downunder, which they were at least pondering around the time of the AWS roadshow I attended a few months ago.

    On the other hand, if Google keeps expanding on it’s App Engine strategy that *will* cut into the business of everyone else in the datacenter and cloud-hosting market, and someone could always launch a major data storage / backup startup based on the App Engine platform (if they haven’t already).

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