Melbourne Data Centre Options: Primary Site or Secondary to Sydney?

Melbourne's place in the market

Melbourne is Australia's second-largest data centre market after Sydney. On the DChunt map (/map), Melbourne has 64 facility records, and Victoria as a whole has 71, compared with 105 in Sydney. That makes it large enough to offer genuine choice and competition, while being far enough from Sydney to be a meaningful backup location.

For first-time buyers, Melbourne comes up in two ways. Victorian businesses often ask whether they should host locally or go to Sydney. Sydney-based businesses ask whether Melbourne is the right place for a disaster recovery site. This guide helps with both questions.

Melbourne precincts and operators

Melbourne's facilities cluster in a few areas:

• The CBD, Docklands and Port Melbourne, where a number of established, connectivity-focused facilities sit close to the city. • The western suburbs, including areas around Deer Park, Laverton, Brooklyn and Derrimut, where many larger and newer campuses have been built. • The south-east and other suburbs, including sites such as Clayton, Mitcham and Richmond.

By number of facility records in Melbourne on our map, the operators with the most entries are NEXTDC (5), Equinix (4), AirTrunk (4), Vocus (4), and then Amazon Web Services, STACK Infrastructure, Digital Realty and Microsoft with three each, followed by CDC Data Centres, Telstra InfraCo and NTT DATA. There is also a long tail of smaller local operators.

As always, a facility count says nothing about quality or availability, and some of these sites are cloud providers' own facilities or large single-tenant campuses rather than retail colocation. The provider directory (/providers) helps you focus on operators that sell rack and cage space.

Primary site: when Melbourne makes sense

Melbourne is a strong primary site if:

• Most of your users, staff or customers are in Victoria, Tasmania or South Australia. • Your IT team or managed service partner is based in Melbourne and will visit regularly. • You can get the connectivity and cloud on-ramps you need in your chosen building. • Pricing for your requirements compares well with Sydney once you include power, cross-connects and setup.

If your users are national, or you rely on cloud services and partners that are concentrated in Sydney, a Sydney primary site with Melbourne as backup may serve you better. Neither choice is wrong; it depends on where your users and dependencies are.

Secondary site: the Sydney–Melbourne pairing

Sydney and Melbourne are the most common data centre pairing in Australia. The cities are far enough apart that a single local event is unlikely to affect both, yet close enough that network latency between them is low enough for many replication and failover designs.

If you are planning Melbourne as a disaster recovery site, think through:

• Recovery objectives. How much data can you afford to lose (recovery point objective) and how quickly must you be running again (recovery time objective)? These decide whether you need continuous replication or periodic backups. • Replication method. Synchronous replication across long distances can be sensitive to latency, so many designs use asynchronous replication between cities. Test what your applications tolerate. • Network links. Ask operators and carriers about diverse inter-city links, and avoid relying on a single carrier path between your two sites. • Same or different operator. Using the same operator in both cities can simplify contracts and interconnection; using different operators reduces dependence on one company. Weigh both. • Testing. A disaster recovery site that is never tested is a hope, not a plan. Budget time to run failover tests.

Our learning centre (/learn) has a beginner's guide to disaster recovery that goes deeper on recovery objectives.

What to compare before signing

Whichever role Melbourne plays, compare facilities on the same criteria:

• Power density per rack, how power is charged, and room to grow. • Redundancy design for power and cooling, and any independent certification. • Carriers and cloud on-ramps present in the building. • Cross-connect pricing and lead times. • Remote hands availability and cost, which matters more for a site your team rarely visits. • Access and security processes for your staff and contractors. • Contract term, annual increases, renewal and exit terms. • Sustainability evidence, such as a current NABERS rating.

The comparison tool (/compare) lets you line these up across operators, and the coverage page (/coverage) summarises Melbourne alongside other cities.

Pricing considerations

DChunt does not publish live quotes, and pricing varies with power, contract length and the specific facility. Some general points still hold:

• Power is often the biggest cost driver, so get quotes for the same power allocation in each city. • Disaster recovery sites can sometimes be smaller or lower-density than the primary, which reduces cost, but make sure they can carry the load you need during a failover. • Cross-connects and inter-city network links add recurring costs that are easy to forget. • Remote hands usage tends to be higher at a site your team does not visit often.

Get written quotes covering setup, monthly charges and annual increases, and compare total cost over the full term rather than the monthly rack price alone. Our guide to colocation costs in the learning centre (/learn) explains the line items.

Ready to narrow it down?

Whether Melbourne is your primary site or your backup, the right answer depends on your users, recovery needs and budget. DChunt's free assessment (/assessment) weighs those factors and suggests cities and operators to shortlist. DChunt is independent and does not resell space.