Pacnet opened its newest data center in Hong Kong today, and CEO Bill Barney said the facility, designed to LEED Gold and Tier III standards, will be followed by more big data center announcements later in the year.

“We are trying to expand into areas where the Cloud is and where the Cloud is going,” Barney said.

“We’ll be expanding in Australia in the next four or five months and we are looking further at Singapore and potentially Taiwan.”

He did not say if these expansions would include the LEED Gold accreditation CloudSpace hopes to achieve this year – if it does it will be the first colocation provider in Hong Kong with the certification.

Pacnet is still waiting to receive its LEED accreditation – The uptime Institute is visiting on August 26.

The second CloudSpace (HKCS2) data center – Pacnet’s fourth data center in Hong Kong and 22^nd around the world - has been constructed at the Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate just 100m from one of Pacnet’s landing stations.

Pacnet operates the EAC-C2C subsea cable network linking to Singapore and Taiwan and North America and last year it released a plan expand its content delivery network (CDN) around the world to keep up with growing demand for rich media and cloud computing.

Both data centers at the Tseung Kwan O site link directly to this EAC-C2C subsea cable, which offers low latency connectivity and the site is also home to two other Pacnet landing stations.

This level of connectivity is becoming even more in demand as companies introduce more cloud services,” Barney said.

“If you look at the Chinese technology firms you are seeing consumer-based cloud applications in the mobile space becoming very active while in the private cloud, there are a few banks moving into the space as well as western multinationals,” Barney said.

“But what’s really driving data center usage right now are the large application providers in the consumer cloud mobile space.”

To keep up with the needs of this market, Barney and his team developed CloudSpace to be high capacity. It sits on two floors and offers 3MW of power for its 800 racks, with about 4kW per rack.

Overall, the N=1 data center covers 5,000 sq m, and according to Pacnet VP of data center construction and operations Giles Procter, it uses a CRAC based cooling system and six generators and two substations.

“Given the ambient temperature you actually have a closed circuit on the outside, so the only efficiency you get is manufactured on the land,” Procter said.

“Given the ambient temperature we don’t have a lot of opportunity to do any economy cycle, so it is a closed cycle system.”

Just yesterday, Bloomberg released a study from its user group showing that Hong Kong is now one of the most attractive places to do business, largely due to labour costs and economic integration.

Its government has been trying to lure more data center investment to the country to cater to expected demand in coming years.

Procter said for data center operators it is the combination of the network capacity and the blue chip environment that generates interest.

“It has good capacity speeds to Asia and a very broad customer base,” Procter said.

“We are headquartered between here and Singapore, and Hong Kong is a very easy place to do business – it is also chosen by a lot of inbound companies.”