Equinix Inc, a global data center and interconnection company have made a new announcement today. The announcement heralded the opening of the fourth International Business Exchange (IBX) data center. This center, which will be situated in Melbourne, Australia, will be referred to as ME2. The center’s role is to meet the growing demand for digital transformation happening all across the globe, aiding in the interconnection and smart city development needs that Melbourn itself has.

Spreading Smart City Development

The ME2 IBX is situated within the Fishermans Bend region of Melbourne, which stands as the largest urban renewal project in the country. Companies that leverage ME2 IBX through operating with it are capable of gaining access to an ecosystem of about 10,000 businesses. These businesses all work on Platform Equinix spread across the globe. As it stands now, ME2 IBX has been preemptively named a key player within the smart city development project of Melbourne.

The ME2 IBX facility itself is worth a hefty 77.5 million USD and included over 29,300 square feet designated as colocation space. Should the facility be fully built it, it has the capacity to include over 88,000 square feet, or about 8,190 square meters, of colocation space. The sheer amount of possible space is something that has a lot of potentials to grow.

Services Galore

The exact functions that ME2 IBX offers to the world are many. It hosts an array of interconnection options, a good example being Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric or ECX Fabric. ME2 IBX further supports an SDN-enabled, on-demand interconnection service, one that allows for any business to connect to its own distributed infrastructures, as well as the infrastructures of other companies. This includes some of the world’s biggest cloud and network service providers that operate on Platform Equinix.

Direct Access To Exchange And ASC

As it stands now, ECX Fabric provides users with access to one of the largest collections of on-ramps to cloud service providers in the entirety of Australia. It can provide things like Google Cloud, Alibaba, AWS, SAP Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Softlayer, Oracle, as well as an array of local providers. Furthermore, ECX Fabric is capable of giving access to heavyweight providers of network services, including Vocus, Telstra, and Optus.

ME2 IBX Further serves as the only location within Victoria proper, that has direct access to the Victoria Internet Exchange, as well as the Australia Singapore Cable, or ASC.