Fujitsu to spend $17m at Malaga

Fujitsu has committed to spend up to $17 million upgrading its Malaga data centre, where it is aiming to gain a competitive edge by securing the highest level of industry certification.

The Japanese technology company announced this week it had obtained independent tier IV certification for the design of its Malaga facility.

Not-for-profit industry body the Uptime Institute, which manages the process, said this was an important first step towards certification of the constructed facility.

This week’s update comes two years after Fujitsu said it would spend $10 million at Malaga to gain tier IV certification, the highest possible rating.

A spokesman said the group was now planning to spend between $15 million and $17 million, which included other upgrades out of the scope of the tier IV requirements.

The plan to gain tier IV certification at Malaga followed an outage in 2015 that was a significant setback for the business.

Fujitsu’s major competitors in the Perth data centre market include Metronode, NEXTDC and Pier DC, which have all obtained tier III accreditation - the minimum standard required under the state government’s GovNext plan.

As a result, the prime contractors that will deliver GovNext – Atos, Datacom and NEC Australia – have all partnered with the tier III data centres.

One of the goals of GovNext is to reduce the number of data centres used by state government agencies, from 60 currently (including small in-house centres) to just two or three.

The tier certification process relates to the amount of time each data centre is available and functioning properly, and considers the amount of redundancy (backup) in each facility.

Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand chief executive Mike Foster said tier IV certification would provide unprecedented guarantees of availability for all businesses that relied on cloud-based data.

“Those data centres governed by tier IV standards will give customers even greater confidence to move more mission-critical applications into ‘always on’ cloud infrastructure,” he said.

The update on Malaga was part of a broader announcement, in which Fujitsu said it would spend $100 million across its Australian data centres.