Four of South East Asia's leading datacenters namely Singapore's 1-Net Singapore, Malaysia's The AIMS Asia Group, Vietnam's CMC Telecom and Thailand's TCC Technology (TCCT) announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to form a Data Centre Alliance to meet acute datacenter requirements in the region. Together, the datacenters within the Alliance will form a one-stop Hub that provides a full suite of services and connectivity. With a combined space of more than 500,000 square feet and a projected annual turnover of S$100 million by 2009, the Alliance will become one of the biggest datacenter operators in the region catered for first-tier telcos, government agencies, banks and other businesses.
The focal point of this Alliance is to create network and systems interoperability while allowing peering between all its datacenters to enable seamless transfer of data and digital media for enterprises. It will also offer value added managed services such as Digital Asset Management and delivery systems. Through the Alliance, customers can easily set up complementary and alternative disaster recovery sites across borders. The objective is to ensure enterprise customers can gain easy access to the same high level of service at every datacenter within the Alliance. Upon signing the MOU, members of the Alliance will move towards definitive agreements between the parties, common Service Level Agreements (SLA) and establish peering between the data centres so as to start operations by end of 2008.
Other priorities of the Alliance include working towards jointly developing technologies and promoting adoption of industry standards among its members such as a Green Data Centre initiative to drive energy efficient processes and standards.
Unlike other datacentrers, this four-country Alliance extends a unique advantage of providing regional value added services while understanding and serving local customer needs. Enterprises can expect to reap full benefits at each of the datacenters under the Alliance including best practices, high reliability and security.
The datacenters within the Alliance will meet Tier III and above standards as stated by the datacenter Tier Classification from Uptime Institute. They will also be using ISO27001 as reference for the information security management system (ISMS), a quality management system (QMS) as per ISO9001 and an ISO20000 reference for IT Service Management Standard.
Driven by sharp growth in IT services in Asia, the datacenter services market is experiencing colossal demand. In Singapore alone, according to an IDC Market Analysis Report, the market size for datacentrer services is estimated to be US$270 million in 2007 and is forecasted to reach US$326 million in 2011 at a CAGR of 7%.