Australian telco Vocus Communications has purchased IT firm ASG’s Perth data center for AUD$11.7m.

This is the second data center acquisition in two months for Vocus - in July it bought New Zealand backbone provider FX Networks for $107m.

ASG had spent $13m on the Bentley, Perth data center, which opened in September 2011.

At the time the IT services company announced it was to be the first of several facilities as it prepared to expand its managed services offering.

The facility features two data halls and, according to reports, a ‘substantial investment’ was made in redundant plant to ensure uptime.

The facility is built to ISO-27001 security standards, Australian data center standard AS-2834 and global standard TIA-942.

According to ASG’s national infrastructure architect Nandan Thakar the facility was built to Tier III requirements, but not officially certified.

At the opening in 2011 Thakar said the company’s management felt it was “imperative” to own its data center assets, since existing customers saw the data center as a “gap in the ASG solution.”

However, a recent statement from the board of ASG, declared that its data center was a ‘non-core asset’.

The facility was being sold in a bid to reduce debts, which now stand at $10m.

Anchor tenants at Vocus’s new facility include much of the Western Australian government’s shared services infrastructure, a major West Australian power utility, two large customers in the resources sector and ASG’s own ‘cloud computing’ platform.

ASG will remain a tenant of the center, with Vocus being its preferred supplier of telecoms services.

"While important to the workings of the group, it was recognized that the data center would be better in the hands of a partner for whom data centers were core to their business," the company said in a statement.

ASG CEO Geoff Lewis said the opportunity to extract far greater synergies by entering the partnership with Vocus was persuasive.

Lewis said ASG could now offer better service to existing customers.