Rackspace Australia expands main bit barn, adds DR site

Rackspace's Australian tentacle has decided the time is right to expand its main bit barn and open a disaster recovery site.

Digital Realty's bit facility in the Sydney suburb of Erskine Park hosts Rackspace's Australian kit. Things are going well enough down under that Rackspace is expanding into a second hall of that facility.

It's also taken some space in one of Equinix's Sydney sheds for a new disaster-recovery-as-a-service service. Rackspace isn't trying to replicate the likes of Azure's or vCloud Air's “your VMs will be mirrored into our DR cloud and fail over if your primary bit barn borks” proposition. Instead, the DR service is intended to give customers with dedicated services and servers hosted by Rackspace a bolt-hole for a second rig. The service is therefore just about bespoke: rather than using a Rackspace DR service, customers will choose their own backup, replication and DR tools,, set their own recovery point objective, and point it all at the second site.

Rackspace Australia general manager Angus Dorney cited customer demand for DR as the motivator for the move, and said Equinix got the gig because customers want a DR site to be in a Goldilocks Zone – not too close but not too far away – from Erskine Park. That desire ruled out expansion to another Australian city.

But Dorney said the Erskine Park expansion was designed to be picked up and moved, to an even greater extent that Rackspace's usual modular designs, should the company decide it needs a bit barn of its own. So perhaps more expansion is under consideration for Rackspace Australia. Doing so would make sense: rivals already have footprints in multiple cities and Rackspace is absent from Melbourne, leaving it without a presence in Australia's second-largest city. ®