Credit: Equinix
Equinix has extended access to Alibaba Cloud in Sydney, allowing Australian enterprises to privately connect to the service.
The move gives the Chinese giant another leg-up in the Australian market, a year after it entered Gartner's top five local cloud providers for the first time.
Through Equinix, users will be able to access Alibaba Cloud's suite of services, which include elastic compute service, storage, relational databases, big data solution and content delivery network (CDN).
The expansion coincides with Alibaba Cloud integrating its application programming interface (API) with Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX Fabric), the data centre operator's on-demand, software-defined networking (SDN)-enabled interconnection service.
This allows users access to private and direct connections to Alibaba Cloud.
Equinix has eight data centres in Sydney, located near the CBD, Alexandria, Silverwater, Unanderra and Rosebery.
Royce Thomas, senior vice president of global account management at Equinix, said he was glad to be furthering the company’s collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, which began in June 2017.
“In today’s digital economy, delivering cloud computing has become a top priority for enterprises. As such, direct access to cloud service providers, like Alibaba Cloud, via high-speed, low-latency connections is helping enterprises gain a competitive advantage and fully realise the benefits of the cloud,” he said.
“We are happy that we share the common goal with Alibaba Clould to help enterprises locate services, interconnect to them and build valuable relationships with their business partners. With this extended reach, we will continue to partner with Alibaba Cloud and support more enterprises to accelerate their digital journey across the globe.”
In addition to Sydney, Alibaba Cloud was also made available in 16 other locations, with four of these also in the Asia Pacific region – Hong Kong, Jakarta, Singapore and Tokyo.
In the United States, the service was made available in Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Seattle, Silicon Valley and Washington D.C..
Further, access was also made available in three locations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa – Dubai, Frankfurt and London.
This isn't the first time a data centre operator has struck a deal with Alibaba Cloud, with NextDC inking an agreement in October 2018.
