Historically, Singapore has been a major port city for Asia and the world. On any given day, up to 50 ships could be arriving per hour. Similarly, multinational companies are flocking to Singapore. According to the Singapore Ministry of Manpower, there are over 7,000 multinationals doing business in Singapore.
Singapore is also very well connected. Its market, political and regulatory infrastructure makes it the most network-ready environment in Asia, according to the 2014 Global Information Technology Report. The numbers to prove it: In 2013, the number of corporate-wired broadband subscriptions was 98,600, wireless subscriptions totaled 9.26 million and 3G mobile subscriptions were 5.258 million.
This massive opportunity for business growth and interconnection has increased demand for multitenant data centers and led us to open our third International Business Exchange ™ (IBX®) data center in Singapore. SG3 is the largest Equinix data center in Asia-Pacific, with 35,000 square meters of colocation space and room for 5,000 cabinets at full build-out.
Built from ground up with intelligent new designs that raise the bar for eco-friendly initiatives and support high power density computing, SG3 becomes the third point in a triangle of network-dense Equinix data centers in Singapore. Combined, our three Singapore facilities will host more than 190 network providers and enable access to cloud and managed services providers and systems integrators, creating a highly interconnected campus. In addition, our SG1 data center is currently one of the world’s three GRX peering points.
What excites me most about SG3 are the variety of multinational businesses that will interconnect there and the industry ecosystems and new business models that will form within its four walls. The companies coming aboard include network, content/digital media and cloud service providers, and enterprises in pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and financial services. SG3 was built to comply with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Technology Risk Management (TRM) outsourcing guidelines for financial institutions’ data centers and meets the Threat and Vulnerability Risk Assessment (TVRA) criteria.
SG3 joins other global Equinix IBXs that are near major media companies’ Singapore offices (i.e., Lucasfilm and Empire Multimedia Corp.). Digital media syndication applications transfer massive amounts of large data media files in-country and globally, requiring direct, high-performance interconnection solutions, for which SG3 is well-positioned.
Singapore is also evolving into a busy cloud hub, with a substantial number of cloud providers calling our three Singapore IBX data centers home. Enterprise mobile, mobile content applications, big data and analytics are the next big trends consuming cloud services in Asia-Pacific. On-demand platforms have the scale to facilitate “big data crunching,” which requires a lot of compute, data storage and networks. Close proximity to these services within a large multitenant data center will increase performance and reduce the costs of interconnecting these data-intensive applications to the resources they need.
The deployment of the Equinix Cloud Exchange (now in 22 markets) for building hybrid multi-clouds is also creating a lot of interest. Customers can interconnect to the Cloud Exchange to create on-demand private virtual networks services that improve application performance over cloud services. Whenever workloads require a certain bandwidth or cloud service(s), businesses can easily provision automated connectivity to multiple networks and clouds through the Cloud Exchange portal and APIs.
Once you remove the physical interconnection barrier and introduce a secure, yet optimized private architecture for cloud-based applications to request on-demand network resources, enterprise cloud adoption and consumption grows, resulting in greater migration to hybrid clouds. This also enables all types of service providers to sell their services – security, SaaS, big data analytics, etc. – through the Cloud Exchange.
As we open the SG3 doors to new businesses and opportunities, we see numerous possibilities for innovation and growth for all of our existing customers ̶ and for those that have yet to make it to port.
Subscribe to the Equinix Blog