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Amazon To Launch Sydney Data Center

Posted by timothy on from the cia-will-count-sheep-all-night dept.

schliz writes "Amazon Web Services will unveil its first Australian data centers on Tuesday, ending more than a year of speculation. The move is expected to address enterprises' data soverignty and latency concerns, although local cloud providers argue that data held by U.S. company Amazon would still be subject to the Patriot Act."

31 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. International Bandwidth. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Singapore or nearby would be better, our international pipes suck at the moment.

    1. Re:International Bandwidth. by afgam28 · · Score: 2

      This is about as non-sensical as the Australian "president" who is a Christian and supports what he says ;)

      Also, AWS already has a lot of their services avaialble in Singapore: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/globalinfrastructure/regional-product-services/

    2. Re:International Bandwidth. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Contrary to popular belief, Australia's international *bandwidth* is not too bad, it's in the high 10's if not into the 100's of Gb/s in total now. Amazon already has a data centre in Singapore and services hosted there still suck. There are these things called round-trip-time and latency, which are actually much worse for the performance of interactive applications than lack of bandwidth alone. Having services hosted on continent will help out a lot, well, the eastern side anyway, Perth might still have some problems.

    3. Re:International Bandwidth. by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      The sad thing is that a single fibre pair can carry 4 Tbps over long distances (relatively standard 100 Gbps Ethernet, and 40-channel DWDM), all it takes is a little capital to set it up. The cost of buying and laying that much fibre is more than the optics.

      --
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    4. Re:International Bandwidth. by DeSigna · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Australia has several 10s of terabits of international capacity, of which around 2Tb (from memory) is actually "lit". There's 4 main cable systems (AJC, SCCS, PPC-1 and SeaMeWe-3), a few smaller ones to surrounding nations (JASURAUS, Gondwana-1) and a handful of multi-terabit modern ones that are barely ticking over (like Telstra Endeavour).

      The growth in capacity has drawn quite a few international service providers and carriers to Aussie shores, and the resulting demand for domestic capacity has done nothing but good things for the price and availability of rack real estate and domestic transit. Our domestic providers are all pretty healthy, just waiting to see how the NBN pans out.

      I can't see any problems with a big cloud provider like Amazon entering the market here. If it doesn't start forcing storage and bandwidth costs down further I'll be quite surprised.

    5. Re:International Bandwidth. by a.koepke · · Score: 1

      I use AWS services in Singapore and get around 60ms ping time. iiNet, due to their takeover of Internode, have their own link in SEA-ME-WE. The ping time is about the same as to the east coast

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    6. Re:International Bandwidth. by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      Off the shelf commodity parts will get you over 100 km. Beyond that, you run copper next to the fiber and evert 50 km or so, you have a powered amp, run off the electricty from the copper.

      When you do it with "stupid" amps, you can upgrade 10,000 km of fiber with optics changes on both ends, and not having to touch the middle. That's standard "best practice" today. You have to work hard to get a setup that can't go 10,000 km at 4,000,000 Mbps driven from commodity optics. Well, they assume specialized optics and spread out the amps, but the principle is the same, and you could built it yourself today, aside from the fibre. A lot of the cost is getting a single piece of glass that's 50 km long (as, also in practice, you pay more for a single cable because splices can introduce weakness and error).

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    7. Re:International Bandwidth. by Dan541 · · Score: 1

      All traffic from Perth to the US or Europe passes through the eastern states. So a data centre in Sydney will be a huge improvement.

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    8. Re:International Bandwidth. by Dan541 · · Score: 1

      Placing a Datacentre in Australia will reduce the load on our international links and have no impact on domestic traffic. The exception to this would be international traffic to the centre, but that's likely to be the minority.

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    9. Re:International Bandwidth. by snookums · · Score: 1

      Indeed. There is a direct Perth-Singapore transit, but most East Coast-Singapore data goes via some combination of Guam, Japan, and Hong Kong, and the latency is the same or worse than to US West. I believe Internode set up some special routing via Perth for one particularly latency-sensitive application that is hosted out of Singapore for Australian customers (Starcraft II).

      There's a new Perth-Singapore cable due to come online next year, though I can't find any information about progress of the build. When that cable lights up we should see more traffic taking this route, and hopefully better latency to Singapore for all Australian users.

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    10. Re:International Bandwidth. by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      One thing to keep in mind, it is far easier to repair the cable than it is to rebuild the data centre and it's lost data. That should be the ultimate driver of choice in where to locate the data centre. One data centre failure and you business in terms of reliability is dead.

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    11. Re:International Bandwidth. by DeSigna · · Score: 1

      Consider that a lot of central phone exchanges and DCs are in the Brisbane CBD, and most kept working in early 2011 when a good chunk of the state's land area was underwater: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1616757. The locations I've got gear (PIPE DC3, Pegasus and Fujitsu) were well out of the flood zone, being located in areas above any reasonable flood level - if they had gone underwater, there wouldn't be a Brisbane anymore.

      The main drivers of DC location are cost and utility. Cost includes the normal stuff like power, real estate, connectivity and so on, but also factors in risk, redundancy, insurance and mitigation of each of these factors. Even though Sydney is a relatively low risk area to build, being well south of the major storm and seasonal cyclone-affected areas, I'm sure Amazon, considering their international scope, would have taken into account any reasonable level of risk when deciding where they want to put a DC to host their gear.

    12. Re:International Bandwidth. by Lucractius · · Score: 1

      See above comments. Your completely wrong.
      Internode (now iiNet) are on the record as routing direct from Perth to Singapore via SWA-ME-WE

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    13. Re:International Bandwidth. by Dan541 · · Score: 1

      Ok, I need to change ISP. Currently Telstra sends all my traffic through Sydney.

      --
      An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
  2. Re:Ready Go by skipkent · · Score: 2

    I agree with you 100%.

  3. Re:Patriot Act? by CRC'99 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nope, its true. I used to work for a US owned company in Australia - because of US law, we had to do everything in accordance with Sarbanes–Oxley. It was a royal pain in the ass - 100% pure bureaucracy - and just about doubled the work required to do most of our tasks.

    Thankfully, I'm not working there anymore - but that little glimpse into American life really, really made me glad I wasn't working in IT in the US...

    --
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  4. Re:Patriot Act? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    IT falls under the US patriot ACT as it is a US company and hence having a datacentre in Australia doesn't actually solve the data sovereignty issues at all as the US can seize the data from the Company.

  5. Re:Patriot Act? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It seems you have confused two completely different legal regulations. Sarbannes Oxley and the Patriot Act are two totally different things for two totally different reasons.

  6. There is a 100% DC Coming online soon by cfryback · · Score: 1

    Way down in Tasmania.

    The WISP is expanding in the DC arena - http://www.tasmanet.com.au/data-centre/

    1. Re:There is a 100% DC Coming online soon by tumutbound · · Score: 3, Funny

      It's a pity then, that Tasmania is connected to the rest of the world via a dialup link.

  7. Re:Patriot Act? by dbIII · · Score: 4, Informative

    It seems you have missed the point of the example of US law applying to US operations offshore.

  8. Re:Ready Go by crutchy · · Score: 1

    especially about band camp... it should be illegal to shove a flute in one's pussy

  9. Amazon Vs? by sjwt · · Score: 1

    Amazon is putting a DC in Australia.. not that big a deal, now wait until Blizzard puts some servers out here, I'd vote for a bloody Public Holiday.

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  10. Re:Patriot Act? by dave562 · · Score: 2

    Sounds like the legal team failed to properly setup a subsidiary.

    The company I work for deals with complex legal matters. We have data center presence in Canada, APAC and Europe specifically to address the concerns of clients in those jurisdictions who do not want to be subjected to the uncertainties of the PATRIOT Act. It is possible to do it. The cloud providers are spouting FUD.

  11. Re:Patriot Act? by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

    They should have set up an Australian subsidiary that wouldn't be beholden to any US laws.

    --
    Learn to love Alaska
  12. Re:Patriot Act? by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 1

    Yeah, it's amazing how people screw up international business. It's a field all its own, and all the time I see people trying to go it alone - even successful people. Get some damn specialists even if they cost money. You'll save a bundle in the long run.

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  13. Re:Storms? by aglider · · Score: 1

    Earthquakes and active volcanoes in Napoli or Bari? Maybe Catania has Etna, but you clearly know little about Etna eruptions ... It'd be the same risk for Sidney, then.

    --
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  14. Re:Storms? by DeSigna · · Score: 1

    If you're worried about refreshments, see if you can convince Amazon to move the DC to Melbourne.

  15. Re:Patriot Act? by riflemann · · Score: 1

    Nope, its true. I used to work for a US owned company in Australia - because of US law, we had to do everything in accordance with Sarbanes–Oxley. It was a royal pain in the ass - 100% pure bureaucracy - and just about doubled the work required to do most of our tasks.

    I'm current working for a US company in Australia, and I never have to think about SOX. We automated all of the SOX stuff into the background, so day to day I work oblivious to these things.

    Didn't you have automation and process improvement to do the same?

    --
    Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
  16. Re:Patriot Act? by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

    Yes, it would be an American asset. The US could seize it, but orders against internal workings in a foreign company are not the same thing.

    --
    Learn to love Alaska
  17. Re:In other news an Australian browsed the web tod by crutchy · · Score: 1

    that sounds more like pidgin from the pacific isles (used to be the staple labour force for working the cane farms in queensland)