Our network admin and ops manager were loading hardware into boxes last night before leaving the office. This is somewhat unusual, so I grabbed them to find out what was happening before they escaped.

“We’re off to install SYD3”

It’s finally here! We’ve been talking about it for a while, and now it’s imminent. We’ve picked up some space in Equinix’s shiny new SY3 datacentre, which is going to be a beachhead for Anchor’s expansion plans.

Opening the SYD3 point of presence (POP) is a strategic maneuver. Connectivity will initially be a dark fibre to SYD1, essentially making SYD3 a remote territory that, at the network layer, will be fully internal to SYD1. Once things are settled in, SYD3 will light up with local transit providers and start doing fully fledged BGP peering.

There’s plenty of value to be had there even without peering. Cross-connects are rich at SY3 and the location means that we can jack in to Amazon’s DirectConnect, giving us hassle-free, high speed VPN-less access to the cloudy infrastructure that we manage for customers. In addition, a separate physical presence, even without a network point of presence, allows for low latency offsite backup infrastructure.

Once fully active, SYD3 will also be able to provide Disaster Recovery facilities for the customers that need it. We can already reap a number of the aforementioned benefits with our presence in Los Angeles, but the sheer distance between locations presents some challenges. A directly connected POP that’s geographically nearby changes all that.

We’ll have more exciting details to share in the near future. For now, we can show off a little of the hardware that we’re installing.