Rackspace Hosting has opened its Australian data center, housed in a facility run by Digital Realty in Erskine Park, Sydney.

It follows yesterday’s announcement that the cloud and hosting company plans to open a large data center on a 12-acre site in the UK, also managed by wholesale provider Digital Realty.

Rackspace VP of International Marketing Fabio Torlini said working with Digital Realty allows the Rackspace teams to concentrate solely on service delivery and innovation around its Open Compute work.

The new data center will bring Rackspace’s open cloud platform, previously only available in the US and Europe, to the Asia Pacific market later this year.

Open Cloud offers cloud services based on Rackspace’s Open Stack technology, which Rackspace says provides agility and scalability in the Cloud using open infrastructure.

Rackspace Australia and New Zealand Director Mark Randall said the Erskine Park facility has been built to operate with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of less than 1.3, a rating helped by the use of free-cooling technology.

In an earlier interview with Bloomberg, Rackspace Australia managing director Jim Fagan said Rackspace spent tens of millions on the new Tier III facility which is starting operations with 480kW but allows for expansion to 1.4MW.

Rackspace previously serviced the region through its Hong Kong data center, but Randall said a local presence was required to meet local demand for managed virtualised platforms.

He said Australia has also seen a growth in start-up activity in recent months.